Joshua presented the Luminis opening session which was a high-level overview of why to use Luminis and where it is headed. He started by highlighting Luminis use at a few colleges to share the possibilities of implementing portal technology at an institution. The key idea I took from this was a possible new analytic to measure. One school measures the percent of students loggin into their portal after the students receive their admissions info (which includes instructions to log in for the first time). This is a measurement that I think would be valuable for us as well. Not only if they log in after being given instructions, but how long before they do. Is it immediate, a week later, longer?
He also shared the product roadmap which contained no surprises. The one note contrary to the published product roadmap was a note that we may see some Luminis 5 components prior to the planned release date. This is in alignment with the promise CEO Ron Lang made in his address regarding getting functionality to customers sooner. It will be interesting to see how this plays out given the vast differences between Luminis 4 and 5.
In this opening session we didn’t see many details but here are some random notes.
- Post Luminis 4.2 release supporting Red Hat Linux AS 4.* and Oracle 11G
- Luminis 5
- Banner channels rewritten
- Collaboration and community functionality will see academic and non-academic environments
- Acceleration of functionality time to market
- Introduction of AJAX and FLEX interfaces
After the session I went and found the Luminis Developers’ Lounge. It is nice to see that we have a true room again after the fabricated room of last year.
In a discussion with the Luminis Technical Architect we learned more details of Luminis 5 which sound promising. One concern though is that it will be such a new product that I worry about out of the box stability and new growing pains. They are obviously working now in a new development environment that should result in better product releases than we’ve seen in the past.
Confirmation received that email and calendar will no longer be delivered as part of Luminis. Existing Sun licenses will be migrated to Sun directly. Email and calendar integration will be expanded to include Sun, Microsoft, Google and — later — Zimbra.
The portal framework is obviously focused on Liferay but they believe support will be available for other frameworks (e.g., Oracle Portal, uPortal) based upon their new architecture. Liferay though is the primary Luminis 5 target.
More technical info to come in the Luminis 5 Architecture session.