Longsight provides our comprehensive support services for campus portals developed in Drupal and uPortal.

Drupal is an open-source platform and content management system for building dynamic web sites offering a broad range of features and services including user administration, publishing workflow, discussion capabilities, news aggregation, metadata functionalities using controlled vocabularies and XML publishing for content sharing purposes. Equipped with a powerful blend of features and configurability, Drupal can support a diverse range of web projects ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven sites.

uPortal is a free, sharable portal developed as community source by institutions of higher-education. The uPortal Project is the 2007 winner of the EDUCAUSE Catalyst Award which recognizes groundbreaking solutions to major challenges in higher education. This project sees an institutional portal as an abridged and customized version of the institutional web presence... a "pocket-sized" version of the campus Web. Portal technology adds "customization" and "community" to the campus web presence. Customization allows each user to define a unique and personal view of the campus Web. Community tools, such as chat, forums, survey, and so on, build relationships among campus constituencies. uPortal is an open-standard effort using Java, XML, JSP and J2EE. It is a collaborative development project with the effort shared among several of the JA-SIG member institutions. Longsight has been supporting the fully open sourced uPortal software for several years; see http://www.uportal.org/.

Drupal is the extensible platform of choice for content management, social web sites, integrated portals and much more. Drupal is backed by an enormous, global community that has produced thousands of modules that extend Drupal's capabilities. Longsight can leverage the power of Drupal to create an engaging web presence, collaborative space or community site, or to integrate services into a portal - then we'll provide hosting, support and training to ensure your long-term success.

Drupal has the ability to define very granular roles or permission sets that can be assigned to user accounts. This is particularly useful for providing appropriate access to content for different constituencies. Authoring and editing content are accomplished directly on display pages in a metaphor that makes site updates easy and when they are easy, they are completed often adding greater value (“freshness”) to your site.

Drupal is more than a content management system. The Drupal community has created many modules that add features to Drupal to meet a broad range of needs such as blogging, wikis, calendaring, online polling, photo galleries, content syndication through RSS feeds and subscriptions, online payments, event registration, proposal, abstract and manuscript submissions, and much more. These social media tools not only make the web portal more attractive, but are well aligned with the expectations of today’s students and faculty.

Longsight has deep experience in designing and implementing Drupal as a solution for both content management and building online communities. Some of our recent projects include Academic Commons, Human Rights Watch, and LiveStrongAction.

What do you need?

We work hard to customize solutions for each of our clients. Contact us.