Forum .LRN Q&A: dotLRN as a uPortal channel?
I went to the uPortal tutorial to learn about our open source competition. Instead I may have found an excellent cooperative marketing opportunity.
The tutorial was a series of case studies by universities that have used uPortal to implement a portal for students or in some cases just staff. Organizations chose uPortal when they already had the functionality they needed in various different systems and want to provide an integrated view. uPortal seems to especially appeal to universities with a large number of home grown systems.
uPortals is small. They said you could read the source in an evening.
Most of the systems demoed had a portlet/channel into their course management system (blackboard, WebCT). This portlet was not very sophisticated, the one I saw just listed the classes the user was a member of and provided one click access to the class page. The WebCT press release says their channel provides class links and announcements.
The hardest part is one login authentication. At this seminar, many of the universities launched initial systems without one login authentication then started a second project just for authentication. One university found they had literally 20 systems each with a potentially different login name/password.
I will try to learn more about uPortal and what class management systems are providing in their channel while IÂm at EduCause
Meanwhile, if any of our Java hackers were inspired to download and install uPortal and see if it really is as easy as it looks to create the myGroups portlet as a channel, I think it would be awesome marketing for dotLRN.
Potential advantages of marketing dotLRN to uPortal customers and developers:
1. They have already chosen an open source product.
2. They have already picked a path that requires internal developers, sysadmins etc. and/or small company consultants.
3. uPortal implementers already understand they need another system for course management.
4. dotLRN provides a free-open source alternative to an organization that has already shown that they care about reducing licensing fees.
5. dotLRN/OACS provides rich functionality not yet available as an uPortal channel.
6. Although BlackBoard and other companies are starting to provide APIs that could be used to create channels, the users at this seminar worried that the APIs would not actually allow them all the functionality they needed. A completely open source product allows whatever level of integration they choose to program.
7. uPortal has wide name recognition and a well developed infrastructure with user and developer meeting throughout the year.
8. An OpenACS/dotLRN consulting company could expand their market by also becoming a uPortal consulting company.
