In addition to the listed conference presentations, Jennifer is a frequent speaker on uPortal community calls and at Unicon's cooperative development summits.

Upcoming Presentations

Mobile Portal Development

Learn about standards-compliant mobile portal development in an interactive atmosphere. This session will focus on JSR-168 and JSR-286 mobile portlet development, teaching participants how to quickly bring mobile capabilities to the campus portal. We'll focus on real-world use cases, drawing examples from open source portlet offerings. The will session teach participants to

• Easily add native-looking user interfaces to portlets
• Create and modify device-specific mobile themes for uPortal
• Address performance and compatibility issues unique to mobile devices

We will also discuss uPortal's mobile roadmap and cover options for adapting the portal for use as a local mobile application.

3 hour seminar at Jasig 2011 / Denver, CO
Register

Past Presentations

Rich Portlet Development

Bring your portal into the next decade by building interactive, AJAX-enabled portlets. This session will cover techniques for building modern portlets, including:

• AJAX portlet development in both JSR-168 and JSR-286 portlets
• Front-end technical constraints unique to the portlet environment
• Existing Jasig tools for improving performance and security
• Popular services available for creating mashups

Jasig 2010 / San Diego, CA
screencast, slides

uPortal 3.2 Roadmap

A high-level overview of the recent uPortal 3.2 release and the next upcoming release. This session will include a summary and demonstration of new features and functionality, upgrade tips, and a roadmap of upcoming development. Discussed features will include new administrative tools, mobile development, and the state of JSR-286 in uPortal.

Jasig 2010 / San Diego, CA
screencast, slides

Mobile Portlet Development Seminar

This session will provide developers with a hands-on understanding of mobile development techniques in the portal environment.

We'll cover:

• Creating and modifying mobile themes in uPortal
• Developing mobile interfaces for portlets
• Providing different user experiences based on device type
• Addressing performance and compatibility issues unique to mobile devices
• Re-purposing existing content for use on small screens
• Using Fluid Infusion and the mobile Fluid Skinning System to create great user experiences

Jasig 2010 / San Diego, CA, in collaboration with Colin Clark and Justin Obara

How to use JavaScript in uPortal 3

Best practices in implementing with JavaScript in the portal including a review of the jQuery library, namespacing to prevent collision with integrated or proxied content, and performance issues.

Jasig 2009 / Dallas, TX, in collaboration with Gary Thompson

uPortal Filtered Configuration and Automated Deployment

In-depth discussion of techniques for creating configurable, repeatable builds of uPortal 3 environments. The presentation will discuss how to leverage core maven features such as filtering, properties, and profiles, as well as cover the use of important maven plugins. We will also review the use of uPortal's portlet deployment infrastructure and import/export features. The session will end with examples which use the discussed build techniques to assist in creating automated build environments, enbale better source control management, and allow efficient multi-environment configurability of portal projects.

Jasig 2009 / Dallas, TX

Fluid Layout Reorderer Showcase

A showcase of the design, development, and implementation of the Fluid Layout Reorderer component for drag-and-drop in uPortal 3.1.

Jasig 2009 / Dallas, TX, in collaboration with Gary Thompson

Yale "remember me" Cookie Based Login

Yale's new "remember me" feature allows portal users to ask the portal to get their personal layout without logging in. The feature uses a combination of uPortal's guest mode and CAS to provide a personalized layout with no layout editing abilities and no exposed personal institution-owned data.

The presentation will include a walkthrough of Yale's new "remember me" features, as well as a description of its technical implementation. We will also discuss the user interface implications and the insight gained from our user testing.

Jasig 2008 / St. Paul, MN

Portlet Development Panel

JA-SIG has a growing collection of nifty portlets ready to be included in your 2.6 or 3.0 uPortal implementation. Come to this panel to hear about the great ideas and features implemented by colleagues at Duke, University of Wisconsin, Yale, Southern Utah University.

Jasig 2008 / St. Paul, MN, in collaboration with Parker Grimes and Eric Dalquist

Open Source Portlet Incubation

There are two approaches to open sourcing your portlets. 1) Take an existing portlet that you have been using in your environment and make any necessary changes to make it usable out of the box by other organizations. 2) Identify a common portlet need, get buy-in from the community and develop the portlet from the ground up as a community project.

An overview will be given of these two approaches including the challenges and benefits associated with each. Examples of recent projects developed under each approach will be discussed, including Yale's Calendar portlet and the JA-SIG weather portlet.

Jasig 2008 / St. Paul, MN, in collaboration with Parker Grimes

uPortal Drag and Drop in new YaleInfo site

A brief demonstration of the usability improvements in Yale's new deployment of uPortal based on 2.6 Ajax features.

Jasig 2007 / Denver, CO, in collaboration with Susan Bramhall

Using Ajax to Improve uPortal User Experience

This session will introduce the new Ajax preferences functionality in uPortal 2.6. Improvements include drag-and-drop style channel moving, browsing and searching of channels, and other layout editing features. We'll cover the technical choices that have been made to enable these new features and discuss how these preference behaviors might be modified or reproduced in other themes. The session will also include a discussion of possible future plans for Ajax rendering of channels.

Jasig 2007 / Denver, CO

When Four Eyes Aren't Enough: Using Web-Based Tools to Manage a Large Student Staff

At Yale, we have two full time staff to supervise & support over 75 student Computing Assistants (CAs). Using both an open source product (RT) and a suite of applications that we have developed, we are able to more effectively track the work being done as well as make our student workers more effective. We will present the problems we needed to solve by the development of these applications, as well as the applications themselves.

ResNet 2004 / Princeton, NJ, in collaboration with Loriann Higashi