APS2: Our Pilot Adventure with Luminis IV Leading the Way

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference in Springfield Missouri.

Mike Procopio: And good morning, I’m Mike Procopio. Well goodness, is that way too loud? OK, fine and my manager, Sri Giridharan. Sri and I will be talking about our pilot program to reload  a new portal. First thing I’d like to do is just find out who here is actually is using a portal at the university? Great and what kind are you using? Is there anybody using Luminis? All right and anybody using Blackboard as their main portal or Moodle? Or what was the other one that we had? Sakai. All right and we’re - great and we’re interested in what kind of the ERP you’re using - if you’re using Banner. Anybody using PeopleSoft or something other than Banner or PeopleSoft?

All right, great. All right, moving on. Thank you for doing this blog. Little bit about Seton Hall where the New York City metro area. We have an overall enrollment of about 10,000 little more undergrad than grad, total faculty, total administrators. This is the current configuration we started from. We were using Blackboard as our primary portal, learning management content with connections to a Lotus Notes applications and Lotus Notes webmail as well as banner for our student information. What we wanted to do was turn - was take the portal part out of Blackboard and hook it more closely to Banner which is why we were thinking of Luminis.

We were looking at one time authentication. They can log in one spot, they’re log in to everything - everybody’s log in to what they need to be logged into and seamless and secure access to our applications. From the community perspective, we want everything to be a little more customizable, content pretty much instantaneously, something gets to put in, they can see it very quickly and we wanted to add more features for community development.

So this is the set up that we’re looking at now. Luminis drive in the content and I have something else in the notes, plus access to our self-service information from Banner, Blackboard becomes strictly learning management and also our commerce system to our Lotus and to our webmail and to our Banner. We started off with focus groups, we created a little system, brought in focus groups of students, faculty administrators, show them “Here’s what we’re thinking of giving you.”

What do you think, give us your feedback. We also - for students to get them involved, they could earn community credits to participate. We asked them what they wanted. And of course, I didn’t make that loud enough. I was supposed to say “I wanted all, I want it now.” We can’t give that to them, so we asked them to refine it and this is what they want. Obviously, students want social networking and they want the flexibility. They want to be able to have their own stuff. Faculty wants to see what the students see. And of course, they want to be able to access their course information, rosters, the grade books, things like that. Admins need access to their data and everybody needs timely alerts. We’re all familiar with needing timely alerts and access to our personal information with you and admin, the pay stub, your benefits, your student, your grades, things like that.

And I’ve also categorized topics of interest targeted content. For a pirate, we rolled it out half students half faculty and administrators. We gave them a fairly robust system to start with so that they could play around, tell us more about what they liked, what did work, what didn’t worked, what needed to be refined. We gave them the features of their existing login credentials. What they are using now is exactly what they use to log in. We gave them the links to their courses and announcements for their courses and organizations from Blackboard. They could see that right in the portal. We gave them Integrated Banner Channels so they could see their personalized information and of course email and we provided a feedback drop box so they could very easily one-click, tell us what was wrong and we could know where it was coming from.

And this is the architecture that we used for the pilot rollout. The users logged in one server which acted as our resource and our application server, which hooked up to the database server and the calendar server, realizing that when we go live, this was not going to work. We wanted to move to a load-balanced environment. So we started out adding a second application server.

It came through a virtual IP to the Load Balancer, balancing it between the two servers but there’s a problem with this. When you install the application server, you have to know the ID - DNS that you’re going to be using, in our case PirateNet. We didn’t know that when we start, when we rolled out the Pirate and as the result, the install hard-coated all the links within the application and we couldn’t go and undo them without doing a fresh install of the resource and application server.

To get around this we just created another server. So we have a second application server, the middle server which was acting as resource and application became just the resource server but we still need the connection to the load balancer for the single sign-on connections. Again, this is the architecture we’re going with and that becomes our system and as Luminis, we have single sign-on hooks and LMG is the Luminis Message Gateway. This allows us to take events from Banner and feed them into active directory and the Blackboard Community System. So when somebody come - we have somebody new come in, they get entered in the Banner then information flows right in - flows into Luminis and it also flows back out to the other systems.

But we have one more problem. We’ve got all these systems that we still need to hook into. Everybody who we want Luminis to be when the main entrance to everything. So we had to create our single sign-on to everything. The first and more important one was Blackboard so that everybody can get to their courses and that was established via Campus Pipeline Integration Protocol, that’s SunGard’s proprietary single sign-on protocol. It’s not the most efficient way of getting things done but with the time constraint, it works. In the future, we’re looking at possible different ways to do that. The biggest - the mandate we had for all these was easy visibility for courses and organizations, links to the Blackboard content system which is the primary area that our university uses and also our Pirate Gold which is the commerce system.

They put money on their badges, they can swipe it in the university store and the vending machines and things like that. We also had integrated the existing email. Right now, we are Lotus Notes shop so that then it was going to Lotus Notes webmail. Again, we were using CPIP. We had to create the connector just as we did for Blackboard. They didn’t come out of the box in Luminis, we had to create this. In addition to email, we had to link to many Lotus Notes applications. We use it for our helpdesk, for tutoring - for registering - for tutoring and advisement sessions, password management throughout the university and a number of other things. We use it for a lot, so this was again, a very important piece of integration for the system.

And I mentioned email, we’re going to be moving from notes to exchange in Live@EDU when the process of creating those connectors, we’ve done pilots just within the IT department. We’re not completely there yet. One of the biggest challenges we have is, it comes with an email. Luminis comes with an email channel but the IMAP was a load on our Lotus Notes Servers, so we had to take away the channels but all our users really liked it.

They liked being able to see their first five or ten emails right there on the front page. We’re hoping to be able to bring that back when we move to exchange but there’s another problem and that’s IMAP over SSL isn’t supported. There’s a work around but as you can say - the worth the proxy only supports one server. Faculty and admins are going to be on exchange, students are going to be on Live@EDU. Who gets the email channel?

And we want to bring in personal email. Everybody has a Gmail account, they have Yahoo, they have AOL mail. Hey I want to see that in portal too. How? That’s something that we have to overcome. Yeah, well, SunGard start to come up but then until they do, we do. And of course, because Banner rules everything at our university, we have to have the Banner Integration. Unfortunately, a lot of that comes out of the box because it is a SunGard product. As I said, that’s one of the reasons we went with Luminis. The biggest of course is user accounts getting new people into the portal and then having events flow from Banner into Luminis active directory and Blackboard. And then, we can bring in course assignments and enrollments from Banner, as well as Banner channels which give them easy access to their self-service information and also for the functional users, Internet Native Banner so they can go into the portal and add a user, change a user.

And for the moment we’re not using the course studio which comes with Luminis. We have disabled it for the moment. There are some issues with it but we’re hoping to be able to use that somewhere down the road. And I’m going to turn this over to Sri if we can figure out how to...

Sri Giridharan: Everyone hear me? OK, good. So Mike spoke about our architecture and the overview of our Luminis portal but we put a portal out there but what are we going to do with it other than Banner channels which is what we had out of the box which we configured to talk to our Banner server, we had nothing more.

So the big question - I mean the mandate like Mike mentioned before was Luminis was going to become our content, our entry for all content for the university. So what do we do about this? And in our department we called - start calling “Luminis The Monster”. I mean great, we have this product but what are we going to do? So, how do we feed this monster? And we are developers. We don’t know anything about counting people. We are used to people coming in telling us “We want this content. Please put it up on Blackboard.” And we say, “Great! Is it the module? Do we need to do any development? Get the specs, develop something, put it out there.” Great, that’s what we know but here’s a brand new product now. Obviously, you can now roll it out with nothing in there. So we have to come up with a way to feed this monster and it’s meant in a nice way. It’s like Cookie Monster.

[Laughter]

Luminis does come with the ability to create targeted content. I’m not sure any schools are - the Luminis schools using targeted content. OK, I’m not sure how your users think about it but when we first showed our content providers, they were not happy. They thought this was cumbersome. They didn’t know how to use it. Why does it take so many clicks? How do I know who I’m sending this to? And one of the big bonus points that we were originally going to use was user attributes. Again, anyone using user attributes in Luminis? I might have to talk to you offline but we had tons of trouble with that. We found the goal behind user attributes is your Banner attributes. Let’s take students, like for example, I want to be able to - or our housing office wanted to be able to send out announcements to the students in each residence hall.

Obviously, we don’t want to send out email that, you know, spends all our users when it’s only applicable to our residents in one particular hall. So the traditional we are used to doing this is broadcasts. But guess what, nobody like broadcasts, nobody read broadcast. In fact, we were told off for sending out broadcasts and when information or announcements went out and people then read them, and we said, “Well, it wasn’t a broadcast.” We got told off again. So we wanted to come up with a way that was easy for content providers, easy for the people to - for our students in our community to get other announcements? So, our director actually she came up with this. She started calling this Communication Central single point of creating content that would feed out to the portal and people would be able to customize where it went and who would have access to it.

Again, this is - we had to do this because targeted contents didn’t quite work for us the way we wanted to. We wanted to be able - what happen to Banner attributes couldn’t huge short comings so we actually have a ticket open with SunGard and they said “Sure, we’ll treat it as enhancement.” So what is Communication Central? I mentioned this, it’s real time. We want this to be able to feed directly into our portal. We want to be - our content provider should be able to choose the audience that it’s going to students, faculty - we have two campuses.

We have a law campus and then we have our main campus and our law school is its own - they have their completely different way of doing everything so they wanted things to be done differently so we had to be able to manage this separation and the biggest was when students came back and told us “We missed this announcement. Why can’t we go back and search for it?”

So that’s something that we’re working on. Giving our users the ability to go back and search for past announcements and messages and of course, security. We don’t want - we want to make sure that people who have the ability to send out these paid content only send it out to their constituents and not to everyone. HR has begged on that but they do not - they want to be the sole originators of all HR content. I see, a nodding of heads from HR.

[Laughter]

So this is a little screen shot of what our form looks like and I’ll show you a demo but basically, you have - we have two message, we have two types and you can create either an announcement or an event. Sometimes it’s both, you can have an announcement for an event and you can see the audience here that just says, all our students, faculty, employees and administrators and in the future we are hoping to map this to our Luminis roles.

As of now, it’s more or less mapping to our Luminis roles but we want to be able to marry them even more closely. This is a Lotus Notes application so - and you a “From” which basically identifies the department that’s sending out the announcement. We have categories which actually map to our Luminis channel names. When we first spoke about this, our content providers were very insistent that they know which channel this actually went to. This actually poses a chicken-or-egg problem for us. We want to be able to - I mean right now, we know a list of categories and channels we want to add. But in the future, we want to be able to open this up, make it free from - and for this, we actually have another feedback mechanism. We’re still - where content providers can come and say, “Hey! I want a new category so can you add this to this.” So, at this pointed maps closely to our existing channels and subcategories are - I think it’s best to explain with an example. We have critical events and for critical - we call it the “Critical Corner”.

And the categories for - the subcategories for this is weather-related closings. I mean nobody wants to drive to our university on a snow day and find it closed. We have high alerts, fire - you know, planned fire drills, any high alert closings, so we have these categories and those actually would fall unto the subcategories for somebody who said I want to report - I want to broadcast a message out that the school is going to be closed which choose Critical Corner school closings and put in a message. But that’s easy enough, but we have other categories where your subcategories themselves could map to a channel of its own. For example, you could have, let’s say, conferences and conferences could be a subcategory for a particular school but there might be people who are interested in looking at all conference.

So we basically are opening up the possibility of taking a subcategory by itself and making a channel out of it. And what I’m saying, all of these is going to be - we’re envisioning to be real time. For now, more or less, it is but the hope is when they create conferences, they would dynamically feed into a channel that’s called conferences and users are subscribing to this. And here’s an example, this is what our homepage - our main landing page looks like once you’ve logged in to the portal. And Critical Corner, that’s actually a channel that’s coming right off our Communication Central application. There is activities and there’s our Shoe Family Journal. We have our President’s Office in all good intentions sends out notices every time somebody in the shoe community passes away.

And that was one single thing that we heard from our focus groups. Can we find a different way to hear about death notices we don’t want in our email. So, we came up with “In Memoriam Channel” for our - to cater to this kind of messages. And here’s an example - the exhibits, the Heather George’s - I’m not sure how to pronounce the middle name but there’s an exhibit and that actually maps out to the next slide. This was actually somebody went in and created this content and said “Here’s the date, start date and here’s the location, and here’s a brief tidbit about what this exhibit is about and they put this in and this dynamically feeds into the exhibits subcategory of the activities channel. So that’s a little bit about our Communication Central. What the Luminis features that we definitely like and we are using are the Banner Integration.

That was big - I mean that was the primary reason we even went to Luminis. We were happy with Blackboard. In fact, our focus groups - the biggest question was “Why are we going with a new portal? Why am I - why do I have to deal with another new set of change?” Our students didn’t care. They said “Sure, no problem.” But our faculty and our admins had very different opinions on why we should be changing. So one of the justifications we gave them was, you know, what you previously had to struggle.

You were logging in to Blackboard to do your course management and then you would sign in to your web for self service if the plus self service component to do all your grading and your roster but guess what, now it’s all tightly integrated. You log in to Luminis, you have access to your course roster, your grading, your own - your personal information. So that was a no-brainer for us. Groups we want to use for our residence halls. Our residence hall students and our housing office express interest in using the group studio feature.

At this point, we are trying - we have a whole bunch of organizations in Blackboard that we are hoping not to migrate over to Luminis primarily because they were just being used to send out announcement. So now that we have a better way of doing announcements. We are hoping to use a group studio only for those who actually need to use the extended features of the - of groups. Targeted announcements, we will be using it in a limited form, not as widely as we had hoped to. The out of box, we do get to use the attributes of the user that’s a major - I mean there are class major. So the idea is any school that wants to send out an announcement to all their students would be able to use this. Our business school likes to send out information for all their - to all their students, so we’re hoping somebody - they would be able to make use of this.

We are using the Luminis Calendar but in a standalone mode, in the sense that it’s not integrated with our notes - Lotus Notes Calendar and we did consider that. We even went ahead trying to prove the integration but that was about when our CEO decided he wanted to shift us from a Lotus Notes to a Windows platform. So we actually put that on hold but that was another thing that we heard a lot about - can we not have just one calendar or do we have four calendars? We are not using the course studio primarily because our course content is still in Blackboard and we want to find a way to have the course studio links map directly to Blackboard, we’re not there yet. User attributes, I mentioned, Luminis email Mike mentioned why we were not able to use it, it was a great hit in our focus groups but unfortunately, we were not able to give them the - that particular feature.

Our - with a load balance environment, the first thing we did is we wanted to test the performance. We used JMeter and what we did was we tried to simulate the log in and then access to Blackboard and Self-Service Banner. The idea being that most students would log in basically to get to their courses or registration time and registration time is our most crucial. If anything goes wrong, everybody hears about it. So we want to make sure that goes smoothly and at this point, we’re not happy with where we are.

So we - as of, I think, last week, we still not live. We’re scheduled to go live about three weeks from now but as it stands today, we can support about 300 users in about - in 30 seconds doing this particular workflow. And beyond 400 users, it starts to degrade and that’s unacceptable for us. We want to be able to get at least a thousand users in a minute or under. That’s what we’re working on and if anybody has other tools that they are using that works well for them in terms of analyzing their performance, I’m all yours. Anytime you want it, let me know.

And what makes all of these more interesting is the other IT initiatives that we have going on on campus. We have - like I’ve mentioned, email going from Lotus Notes to Exchange and Windows Live and our authentication - we used to be a novel shop. We’re moving to active directory. Actually, along with this, our file and print services are also changing to use the Microsoft solution and identity management is something that we’re actually implementing right now, the idea being you have a single source of managing all your identities and it’s real time and it’s federated and secure, you know, you get the idea. And the last piece, we mentioned Blackboard integrating with Banner. We’re almost there, we’re not quite there. That’s again, something that we’re implementing right now.

And this would actually create course rosters in Blackboard, your user accounts, at the same time, they’re created in Blackboard. At this time, we are not real time. We are still using our Blackboard Snapshot. How many of you are using Snapshots and hate it? [Laughter] OK, we’re along here. So that’s something we are hoping to do and get away from the business of moving files around. And obviously, this brings a whole bunch of challenges for us. I mean, technically speaking, yes we are trying to bring in yet another new product and amidst everything else that’s going on around us.

But in terms of expectations, I mentioned students wanted something, faculty and administrators wanted something completely different and trying to marry these two worlds in a sense and leave us in a place where we can manage the product and leave our constituents more or less happy. Nobody is going to say, “Oh great, this works 100% don’t do it thing,” but at least if he can leave them in a state where they understand that they have the minimal services that they absolutely need and that this is a work in progress. We would consider this a accomplishment.

Resources and physical - I mean in terms of getting our servers together, we had a bunch of surprises. So Mike eluded to the architecture we had. We were going to - we were planning to go live at four servers. We had to scramble and add a fifth one or load balancer at its own. That was also a new initiative, by the way. So getting that working was a challenge in itself and intellectual - we are developers, we are hard core Java, Oracle and Notes developers and we took this on - we took on this product - I mean this project and pretty much right from insulation, to configuration, to troubleshooting, we’ve done this on our own. So intellectually, it was very stimulating, very challenging but it also had its bumps. We’re not used to these. So we like having specs, decoding to form and then turning it over so…

And the timing actually - this actually - if anything, if I could point to one thing that probably affected our morale the most was the timing. We first shut it off with Luminis 3 - at least planning to go with Luminis 3 about two years ago just about the time we wanted to go over the Linux or Linux shop and I think, just at the time we were going with this, our seminar came out saying that, “Hey, Luminis 4 is going to be available in the next quarter, Linux is supported. So we held back and then Luminis 4 came along.

We did the whole insulation and every time we wanted to go live, just finding the right time to go live and making sure that our users were not affected by what IT was doing was a challenge. And given that we’ve been seeing this for over two years now, I think we’re - it’s safe to say we want to go back to seeing Java. [Laughter] And I mentioned roles and skills - being content provider is again something that doesn’t come easily to us.

So, we’ve come a long way, we’ve come a long way looking and identifying content and saying, “Hey, this will be great on the portal. Let’s do it.” But again, it took a learning curve to get there. Future plans, we’d like to give our students what they asked for. They wanted more personalization. We would like to give that to them. They wanted to be able to get to their social networking sites: MySpace, Facebook. We would also like to have a social networking platform where alumni and our students are able to talk to one another in terms of being resources to one another.

We’re not there yet but we definitely would like to invest time and resources on that. Banner channel development being went with what we gathered at the box. Actually, we scaled down because some of the features are functional users are not using so we actually scaled back on that. But we would like to go back to more channel development.

The other area that’s been challenging for us is we have our content providers who create content for a public website. We are portal teams so having or asking our content providers to duplicate that content for the portal was obviously, didn’t go well. So we want to be able to easily identify those target, those feeds and that content that goes to the public website that also make sense to our internal constituents.

So we want to find an easy way to do that. We are using common spot for our - this is a product from PaperThin for our public website. So we’re not quite there where we can integrate the two areas as yet. And the university scheduler, we would like to have our calendars integrated with Luminis. We’d like to have feeds for our scheduled events feed coming into our portal.

Of the list here, the top two are actually over the underway. We are going pretty close to having our Banner environment load balanced. So once that is there, our Luminis - load balance Luminis environment will be talking to a load balanced Banner. We also have a huge mobility initiative that’s underway right now. Our students - we are - we used to give out laptops for all our students but laptops are yesterday’s news. Our students want the smartphones. Everybody’s texting one another so we wanted to give our students services on the smartphones. Things that came on top from those focus groups was alerts about classes that are filling up one they’ve expressed their interest in pretty clear classes. They wanted to know how soon the classes were filling up or if there were any changes, calendar notices. They wanted all of these on their phones so we are actually working on a development initiative that basically gives much of these web services delivered to a phone.

We’re partnering with Nokia and we are trying to make sure that the Luminis Calendar, events from Banner and Blackboard course announcements and organization announcements are fed into these phones. So you can - I mean I can get - hope it gives you a sense of all the things that we’ve been going through. This marker calendar is an interesting feature we’d like to do.

The events that come out of Communication Central, we want to give the students and our users the ability to say “Hey, I’d like to save and add it to my calendar.” Right now, we don’t have this primarily because it’s a Lotus Notes application and we want to wait until we move or to exchange and marry the two. With Banner 8 comes CAS. We do recognize that Luminis is a single point of entry and a single point of failure for us. So we want to be able - single sign on is down the way, we are doing is not what makes me happy. We would much rather go with something like CAS which basically is a token-based authentication system.

And - well, at this point, we don’t have a choice. It’s a mandate from our management that we do have single sign on and much as we would like to fight that battle, I think for now, we’ll just say we’ll invest our resources and energy on developing for something like CAS, and on to our demo. At this point, any questions? OK, and as you can see it’s still underway, so… All right. So here is our - I mentioned critical Corner and activities. These are feeds coming in from the Communication Central. Here is a calendar. That’s the Luminis calendar channel.

And in the Central is the all courses taken course announcements and these are basically our Blackboard inline frame channels. We would have like to do this the traditional channel development way but given our time constraints, we just said “Hey, we know how to program in Blackboard. We’ll create these channels in Blackboard and then pull them into the Luminis.

So we took the easy way out knowing that this is not long-term but for now, we do what we can and each of these courses is a link. See clicking on these links will actually take you into Blackboard. Mike, can you go to 9-4-1-1? And by the way, the tab names that you see there, that was part of our focus groups asking students and our users what they would like their tabs to be named. And I don’t think anyone came over completely happy. [Laughter] And as you see, it has a big balance. That was actually big on many people’s list.

They still love the fact that they could see their balance and we had actually brought out the fact that you self service is just a click away. So don’t leave yourselves logged in. We are putting in all the security to log you out after the time you were out, after some period of inactivity but those of us who are using the lab computers, make sure you sign out and things like that. So, comes with a price but hopefully our users recognize the advantages and heed these security warnings.

But this is - I guess we have a time out on our CPIP connectors that basically says if you cannot render an extra amount of time, stop. And as you can see, we have two blank channels that stop rendering - I’m not sure if it’s because of our connection from here or - and I said we also have performance issues so we are looking in to all of those.

And in the interest of time, I want to just log out and show you the Communication Central form. Thank you. So log on when we log in.

So there is the link to Communication Central. This was recreated a role for our content providers and only those who have this role would see this channel. So Mike, can you click on the first yet. And this is our farm and as you can see, we have all our audience set up and these more or less natural Luminis roles but at this point, they’re not tightly integrated so yeah. And you have the events, announcements or events or both and you have a date to publish, a date to expire.

If you selected an event it would ask you for the date of the event. And the categories - Mike, can you drop down on the category. Thank you and these are some of the channels that we’re going to live with, which blogs. We have various departments and various people in our deans who have their own blog so we would like to pull all of those in.

And again, this is one of those that is shared on the public site and our portal so - grants and resort job opportunities or students who were big on the job opportunities. There is no one place where they could go and look for all the available jobs on campus and off campus. So this would make it easy for them and Mike, if you can just select one of the categories and then subcategories.

And here are the subcategories for our Critical Corner like I mentioned. So, each of these subcategories would, by themselves be able to function as channels and for some of our events, we have the sponsor, the cost, the - I feel CAS has been taken up. Headlines - Oh, there it is crossed. OK, headlines and URL so we made this easy for people who have are already created content for a public website.

They just have to plug in a URL and then one line ahead, one-liner which would come in as the main feed. And I don’t want to create anything because - how are users testing. And that is about it, unless people have other questions? Great, how did we did great or we didn’t? [Laughter] Thank you.

[Applause]

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