Massively Multi-Tenant Portals at IlliniCloud.org
Channel: Apereo Foundation
Date: 03/06/2014

IlliniCloud is an organization that aims to provide state-of-the-art computing resources to K-12 Education. IlliniCloud has selected uPortal for their education application portal under development for the Illinois K-12 community statewide. Unicon is partnering with IlliniCloud to make this ambitious portal a reality. We have chosen the latest uPortal release ? version 4.1 ? and the brand new Respondr theme for this solution.

One thing that makes this portal special is its requirements for Multi-Tenancy. Individual school districts are the ?tenants? in this portal ? and there are over 800 of them in Illinois! Each tenant must be able to customize the appearance & content of the portal for its own needs. Users who log into the portal get the appropriate experience for the tenant (district) to which they are connected. Tenant customization examples include logo, colors, header/footer text, navigation (tabs), and content (portlets). Tenants, moreover, not only need to manage these items, they also need to ?manage the managers? ? they must be able to grant or deny access to these management functions with regard to their own staff.

uPortal is a very mature portal platform and provides tremendous flexibility. uPortal has provided support for this sort of customization for a long time. In more typical portals, however, these administrative functions have been the exclusive domain of a very small group of highly-skilled technical professionals. In the IlliniCloud portal, we must open these functions up to thousands of local, district-level managers who don't have any background in Java, Web Development, or software projects of any nature.

In this session, we will look at how we implemented the notion of a Tenant in uPortal, and how we polished the administrative interfaces extensively to make them approachable to non-technical managers. We will also discuss how all these innovations were achieved by working within the uPortal community of adopters & developers and accordingly contributed to the public Apereo uPortal project for the benefit of all.