Indiana University's Enterprise Portal as a Service Delivery Framework

Abstract

Indiana University has embarked on a journey to create an enterprise portal, a place to which faculty, staff, students, alumni, prospective students and others will travel to uncover a broad array of dynamic Web services. “OneStart” (http://onestart.iu.edu) provides a compelling place for faculty, staff and students to find services with the intent of developing life-long campus citizens of IU. Indiana University is a large and complex institution consisting of eight campuses, over 92,000 students and 445,000 alumni. Developing one enterprise portal for the entire institution presents tremendous challenges. IU’s portal strategy hinges on the ability to provide a “service delivery framework.” This framework provides single sign-on, customization, personalization and workflow. By making use of component based design methodologies, the framework also provides a flexible publishing environment allowing services to be created by different Web development teams across all IU campuses. This chapter describes the motivation and strategy behind the creation of OneStart, the enterprise portal service delivery framework at Indiana University.