Summit 2007: Luminis Platform Review
Monday at 4pm is the first session I attended. This was originally to be held at 9:30am but was unfortunately reschedule for 4pm (to unfortunately conflict with other sessions of interest.) It was presented by the Luminis product manager with whom I will meet separately with Tuesday morning.
I did not expect any groundbreaking information in the session and was not disappointed. A general overview of Luminis and its use at a few colleges. There are now over 600 Luminis clients around the world. Here are the colleges highlighted:
- University College Dublin (UCD Connect): 22,000 students
- Regular access to UCD Connect in excess of 93%
- Measurable reduction in costs (I’m curious where these reductions were in the institution and how they were measured)
- North-Shore Community College (4000FTE – Pipeline)
- Retention rates up 5%
- 80% say services excellent or very good
- Montgomery College (MyMC)
- Univ Toledo
- Report Dashboard using Crystal Reports
Luminis Platform IV Overview
Pretty basic overview of IV and mention of workshops, training bay (SLC) and CBT updates to support it. Here was the Product Manager’s highlights of new features which I may expand on with my own set (if I have time):
- Groups (user sets): app level groups (announcements), fine-grained permission, fragment management (supports graceful degradation of fragments: silently disappear content from layout if not appropriate to role)
- i18n/l12n
- New Channels:
- Group Activity (Is there a way to ‘select all’ groups and courses to monitor for all applications?)
- Schedule TA channel: to allow easier access to people with this permission
- Manage TA channel: ditto
Beyond — through Banner 8 (next couple years)
- Enrollment Management Suite leverages Luminis components and includes portlets, workspaces and dashboards (and layout fragment enhancements). We did see a picture of a ‘recruiter’ screen presented with Luminis.
- Identity Management: support for 3rd party providers, they want to be a “good identity citizen”
- Rich text editing (WYSIWYG editor for text areas — why still so far off?)
- Mail/calendar interoperability with external systems (e.g., Outlook, Zimbra…). There is good growth of Zimbra in education, they are excited to work with it.
- Targeted Announcement API for wireless and other SDK work
- RSS Aggregator channel
- Course Studio Template system (this was supposed to be in Lum IV)
- Continue work on load/performance testing (not sure what this means)
- Add miscellaneous regulatory items
Beyond — post Banner 8
- Implement portal engine choice and flexibility. uPortal and Oracle portal server: development will occur in parallel. Migration between options will be supported. Timeline: 2009
- Channel drag-and-drop (as seen by another institution last year in Orlando)
- DLM with integrated modes
- System-wide search and file sharing capabilities
- Collaboration enhancements (plan on introducing Web 2.0 components such as blogging and wiki. By then we’ll be on Web 3.0)
Nothing unexpected but good to catch up with the Product Manager and arrange a follow-on meeting as we prepare to implement Luminis IV on our new Sun Solaris environment for Fall 2007.
SunGard HE Summit 2007
Vegas is the host of this year’s SunGard Higher Education’s Summit Conference. SunGard HE is the vendor for our student information system (Banner) and our student portal application (Luminis). I’m joined by 8,199 othe people comprised of SunGard HE staff, vendor partners and higher education customers from across the United States and numerous other countries.
I arrived Sunday afternoon and got checked in at the MGM Grand. Nice enough place but as I tell others, “Once you get in the room, most hotels aren’t that much different.” Of course that may have more to do with the rooms I reserve. After checking in and resting for a bit I headed off to the Mandalay Bay to register for the conference and meet some fellow PCC staff for dinner at the House of the Blues. The evening was a stroll down The Strip to check out the sites.
You’ll find some images of this stroll in the Summit gallery below as I can get them posted. I did a good job of bringing everything I needed with me, EXCEPT for my laptop’s power! I shouldn’t have any trouble borrowing power from others.
Monday brought the opening session for Summit with Vegas style entertainment and the required speech by the SunGard HE CEO. The entertainment was, well, entertaining and befitting Vegas. Scantily clad people doing things that people shouldn’t be able to do — this sounds worse than it was. Acrobatics and trapeze work.
This opening was then followed by a talk from Dilbert creator Scott Adams. This was a laugh-filled look at our often less-than-functional world. Scott recollected on a breakthrough in his life that came about once he realized that hard work in the corporate world does not correlate to rewards. This freed him up to focus less on work ‘success’ and more on life… and becoming a cartoonist. More inspirational perhaps was the perspective that people that consider themselves ‘lucky’ have no more true luck than anyone else, they are simply more expectant that good things will be there for them. I couldn’t agree more, it is hard to have a good life if you expect to be screwed everywhere you turn.
That’s all from now, off to a session.
Guatemala
My father will soon be on his way home to Guatemala for a long overdue visit. He will have the chance to visit with family not seen in many a year and to visit his mother’s final resting place.
This comes at a time of excitement for Guatemala as Rigoberta Menchu, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, recently announced her intention to run for president.
All kinds of presidential news taking place in Guatemala recently, with our own president visiting in March. With the visit coming soon, the native population is discussing the need for a ritualized cleansing.
Apple Fence
Pruned the apple tree and had to do something with all the debris. A cute little fence was erected that at this point is not too sturdy but it is pleasing to the eye.
Apple fence
Night of the Worms
The evening of March 5, 2007, brought about conditions apparently ideal for earthworm mating. Our dog noticed first, when walking her in the yard she seemed overly interested in something in the grass. A little later I noticed that there seemed to be worms out on the yard all over. Closer inspection near a light uncovered a common theme outside — worm reproduction. Yes, night of the worms.
The Night of the Worms gallery shares a few of the images captured. I’m no worm expert but know a little about them from studying and practicing worm composting, but I had no idea about seasonal or mass simultaneous worm reproduction. Perhaps tied to moon phase, it was full on March 3 and on this night I believe was a waning gibbous moon. Of course it could be simply based on current weather, first warm days after a stretch of rain. A single night does not make science so be cautious with anything stated here. If this peaks your interest in earthworms, go learn more about these garden masters and their reproduction.
“The early bird gets the worm,” but on this evening the late bird would have feasted.
Update: Apparently the March full moon is also sometimes called the Worm Moon. This signifies the thaw of the ground and the reappearance of worm castings which means worms are active again. I didn’t see anything noting reproduction associated with this moon.
Cuppers Update
Some of you have been waiting for an update to the Cupcake gallery. It shows a few quick shots of her at the dog park.
This six month old is doing fine and keeping us busy. She has a lot of energy. Our favorite story about her now is that she had a puppy playdate (never thought I’d be involved in such a thing) with a little lab puppy. Cupcake, or Cuppers as she is becoming to me, wore that poor lab out. It was ready for sleep and Cuppers wanted to keep going. Our friends let us know that they would like Cuppers to come over again, their lab pup was worn out for a couple of days providing them some nice quiet time.
What I do…
I suppose you should know a little bit about what I do for work. Officially I’m the Web Services Manager at Portland Community College. That means that I manage development and care of the Portland Community College web site and other web services like our MyPCC student portal.
I’ve got a great team working for me doing a lot of good work. We’re all busy, all the time, but we also keep it light and enjoyable. If you visit the PCC site, your input is welcome as we are always looking for ways to improve. I have areas I want to address, but patience is valuable as we evolve the site from its past existence into the future.
Emma’s Wing Dragonfly
We ran across this dragonfly at Willamette Mission State Park near Waconda, Oregon, this past June 2006. I’m saying that this is a dragonfly but the wing structure is different than I would normally expect. I did find some similar wing structured friends on the Asia Dragonfly site. Hope you enjoy this little creature, it was quite a sight.
Enjoy the larger image to see more details, and let me know if you would like the original larger view to be posted. I’ll update this entry when I have a chance to get an identification.
13-Feb Update: The dragonfly has been confirmed. The Slater Museum of Natural History at the University of Puget Sound has a page of Odonata photos which includes an image of pairs of Coenagrionidae Argia emma. Based upon coloring and, um, positioning, I would guess I digitally captured a female. I’ll leave it to you to verify my finding with the field key for Coenagrionidae (pond damsels). The range map for my little friend matches my suspicion, you may want to check out the other range maps as well. Last, but certainly not least, we have specimen images which hold no weight against the free and living beauty. You’ll find other Western Odonata specimen images that may help with your identification research.
Foxit for PDFs
At home I’ve started using the free Foxit Reader 2.0 for PDF viewing. Boy, does it load fast. It is a very small download as well. Just started with it and no problems yet. Most of the PDFs viewed from home are pretty straight forward so don’t need the full features of Adobe Reader at this time anyway, and just enjoying the speed for general purpose use.