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/.

For many clients seeking to implement a program-wide portal that integrates many services and content types, The Longsight Group often recommends Drupal. Drupal is a powerful and extensible framework for collating disparate resources into an attractive and manageable presentation.

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 campus 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 Web 2.0 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 in higher education. Some of our recent projects include the New Media Consortium, Academic Commons, and a professional association portal for the National Shellfisheries Association.