Re: uPortal and OpenUSS

> where do you see the difference between OpenUSS and uPortal 
> (http://mis105.mis.udel.edu/ja-sig/uportal/)?

-> uPortal is a portal solution like Liferay Portal (lportal)
or Jetspeed or JPortal. So, uPortal can actually be used for a
general purpose portal solution.
-> OpenUSS is an eLearning, a community platform comparable
with WebCT or Blackboard with less functionality (Surely
Blackboard or WebCT are offering more functionality in
their platforms but we try to catch up ;-))

You are correct by asking the difference because:
- uPortal is doing top down approach. They build the portal
   first and then develop the portlets (they call it channels,
   I think) for eLearning. I don't  know what kind of portlets
   they directly supply or you may have to write the portlets
   by yourself...
- OpenUSS is doing bottom up approach. We build the eLearning
   functionality first and then we may develop the portal
   concept. We are waiting for the portlets JSR to be finished
   to choose our portal/portlets solution.

So, uPortal and OpenUSS may meet in the middle ;-) A quite big
difference between the two products is that OpenUSS supports
the ASP (Application Service Provider) model. This means that you
can install OpenUSS once and use it to handle different
multiple organizations. This concept is just comparable with
SourceForge. But instead of developing OS software we are
targeting to teaching and learning activities. This ASP concept
is quite important for us since we want to help other little
educational organizations, which do not have the capability to
install and manage their own "server" to use one of the available
OpenUSS instances. The F/OSS community is surely very welcome to
use our instance at http://www.openuss.org (or you can also make a
stand-alone installation and help other communities, so they can
use your installation. The choice is yours!) ;-).

The sites like SourceForge.net is helping the success of Open Source
software development. I just can't imagine that OSS would be so
successful without sites like SF.net. Many of little OSS projects
just cannot afford to have their own internet server. And this is
also our aim in OpenUSS especially to support little educational
institutions.

You don't have such a concept in uPortal, because uPortal is
delivering the solution for one organization.

 From technical point of view, we are almost similar. Only that
OpenUSS uses more from J2EE technology (incl. EJB) and
we are based on component-based software engineering. Check out
our EJOSA (Enterprise Java Open Source Architecture) for building
the components within OpenUSS -> http://ejosa.sourceforge.net.
I'm preparing a white paper for this (I'll inform the community).

Hope this can help a bit ;-)

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------------------
Blasius Lofi Dewanto
---------------------------------------------------
OpenUSS - Open University Support System
http://openuss.sourceforge.net
---------------------------------------------------
E-Mail   : dewanto-xhPu7QH+N+StU9/[email protected]
ICQ      : 39343280
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Lofi Dewanto wrote:

Hi all,

i am working with on of those *really* smart mit undergrad students to 
get our site upgraded.  We are working on an automated way to submit 
articles, search functionality (many thanks to Michael Wechner) and a 
community blog.

Are there any other features that people may be interested in? Let us 
know and we make no promises if will implement them :)


not that I want to promote our product (Open Source anyway)
but you can use OpenUSS to handle community as well ;-)

where do you see the difference between OpenUSS and uPortal 
(http://mis105.mis.udel.edu/ja-sig/uportal/)?

Thanks

Michael



We have
- document management,
- forum (search engine Lucene), notification,
- mailing list,
- realtime chat,
- web integration (web access)
- quiz (you won't need this ;-))
- etc.

Just check out: http://www.openuss.org and get a student
login, so you can play a bit with the system.

Any questions are welcome!

Best regards,