Portal integrations and functionality

[Mary Elder]

Hi all,

I'm wondering what integrations or other functionality people are delivering through uPortal now?  For example links into email, or SIS systems, or VLEs.  Or other tasks or functionality that sit within the portal.  

We have  some simple integrations, for example to our email and calendar systems, plus a couple more complex ones that allows students to update details, and pay fees, but a lot of our portal content is really just links out to other websites and systems. 

I'm curious to know how other organisations are using uPortal.

Thanks,

Mary 

[jma...@gmail.com]

Hi Mary,

 

At UCR, other than the ones you mentioned and iFraming other sites (Library), we also have the following integrations:

 

• Barnes & Noble (we retrieve student courses and pass them on to B&N site so they can display resources for those courses that they can purchase at that site).
• Student Holds => We retrieve and display student holds from Banner in the notification icon as well as its own portlet.
• Weather Portlet => Created a purely html/javascript/css portlet that consumes a weather RSS feed and displays it in a portlet.
• Staff/Student Spotlights =>  Through some customization we display spotlights in a carousel for our user community.
• Student Employment Verification => Displays a dialog where a student emp can elect to allow UCR to verify their employment or not.

 

Those are some of the integrations/customizations that we did on top of the base install.

 

Best,

 

Juan M. Gonzales

Associate Director, Campus Web Solutions

Information Technology Solutions  l  University of California, Riverside

Office: (951) 827-2530  l  ju...@ucr.edu l  its.ucr.edu

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "uPortal Community" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to uportal-user...@apereo.org.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/apereo.org/d/msgid/uportal-user/9d8644be-d3d4-4288-b2ed-921d5fa82103n%40apereo.org.

[Mary Elder]

Thanks Juan, that’s interesting.

 

Another question, if you don’t mind.  Which of your integrations sees most use?

 

For us it’s the integrations into email, followed up by student finance.  We don’t currently have an integration into the VLE.

 

Thanks,

Mary

 

From: jma...@gmail.com <jma...@gmail.com>
Sent: 11 January 2024 19:24
To: Mary Elder <Mary....@ed.ac.uk>; 'uPortal Community' <uporta...@apereo.org>
Subject: RE: [uportal-user] Portal integrations and functionality

 

This email was sent to you by someone outside the University.

You should only click on links or attachments if you are certain that the email is genuine and the content is safe.

The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. Is e buidheann carthannais a th’ ann an Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann, clàraichte an Alba, àireamh clàraidh SC005336.

[jma...@gmail.com]

That varies by time of year. Start of quarter we see high usage for Student holds/Barnes & Noble integration as students are signing up for classes and buying course materials. Other than those periods email linking out has consistent usage.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Hi folks,

At UC Merced, we had a custom "checklist" of tasks that students needed to address that was driven from Banner (SIS). It would display holds, outstanding charges, etc. We also had a messaging app that would allow select staff to message a curated list of student groups. A few high level admins managed who could message which groups in the portlet. Unfortunately, email was quickly added which turned this little portlet into a spam bot. We had worked on a way to display grades from the LMS, but the Registrar did not want "unofficial" grades displayed to students. We also consumed RSS feeds from other systems to display in the portal. I think this was mostly around sports and other social events on campus.

Some other integrations I have seen:

- Confirming Acceptable Use Policy was read before using the portal, but this acknowledgement went to LDAP and applied to all systems

- Display a student's advisors and appointments

- FInancial aid details for the student

I am sure there are more, but my memory is going with age.

With the current set of web components we have, if a campus service has an API that produces JSON, uPortal can consume that and display it with just configuration. My current design suggestion for content is to surface user details from back-end systems in this manner that is read-only, and add a link to the service at the bottom.

For example, if you have an endpoint that can take a user ID and return financial aid info, have that displayed for the user in the portal and a link after the details that goes to the SIS or Fin Aid service.

Hope this helps,

-bjagg

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/apereo.org/d/msgid/uportal-user/00a501da48ae%2439970980%24acc51c80%24%40gmail.com.