Re: [uportal-dev] Static guest page experiences

[Vangel V. Ajanovski]

Our uPortal installation is also serving our institution homepage. Why
do I do it that way, and not with static pages? 
Because I always wanted to try to implement a guest-user tailored
experience and have a smart portal without even logging in. 
For example: have one web site content layout for users from out of the
country (in English), another layout for guests from in the country (in
Macedonian), another layout for guests from the campus, another layout
for guests from the labs. Flexibility of DLM enables this to be done
in a very consistent and elegant way with various fragment
combinations. And IP addresses are just one way of recognizing guest
user types. In theory it sounds great (especially from the
administration point - since you have only a single system to maintain)
but too bad I never had enough time to try to do it in practice. I
think I'll try to catch up with it for this school year's beginning in
october.

Also if you serve the guest pages under the portal you have the
possibility to
session-track the users' behaviour, keep the guest user navigation
history inside the portal and do stuff like Google Analytics
does, even help the user find the right information even before you
recognize him (or authenticate him). I also wanted to do some
experiments with that. Maybe as part of my ongoing research. Such a
system can be a very interesting feature of a portal framework, if you
agree. That's why I think the DEV list is a nice place to discuss it.

Susan Bramhall wrote:
We already
use multiple guests for different populations. That's easy
to do using a person factory that chooses the appropriate one based on
a url parameter. What we would really like is to allow weak
"authentication" via a cookie so that a user actually gets into the
portal with their own layout but with immutable layout manager shim
like the guest account(s). As long as all the channels which have
private information on them are CASified, these would not display until
the user did a real CAS login. This would make the portal (we imagine)
be more like yahoo or google where strong authentication is not
required.
  
I'd be interested to know what others think of that. (This thread
should really have been on the user list...?)






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Re: [uportal-dev] Static guest page experiences

[Susan Bramhall]

We don't have as many users as other schools but we have made the portal 
guest page the default in the clusters and on kiosks around campus for a 
long time.  We also decided to have some interactive content on the 
guest page - specifically the directory lookup.  The performance has 
never been a problem (300-500 sessions).  The performance problems we 
experience now are more related to heavy use of ajax and javascript 
which we have now largely curtailed on the guest pages.  We set a very 
short inactivity time out (2 minutes I think).  When users login they 
get reset to a longer timeout value. 

The short time out created a little problem because people would walk up 
to a screen displaying the portal with timed out sessions.  They would 
begin by typing a name into the directory lookup, hit search and the 
page would just refresh - new session.  So we modified the portal 
session manager and login interaction to maintain the url parameters 
across sessions - this allows our guest page to behave more like a 
static page.  Changing tabs needs the same altered flow to avoid the 
user experience that the tab change didn't work.

Other folks I have heard of make the entire guest page static - or PHP 
or something else.  I don't think you'd want more than one tab in that 
case though.

Just my thoughts.
Susan

Parker Grimes wrote:
 I would also be interested to know how other schools have approached 
 this. We are considering making the portal guest page the default 
 browser home page on all of our campus computer labs. We wouldn't want 
 the page to be completely static, for instance we would like a weather 
 portlet and some campus news RSS feeds to be displayed. It seems like 
 a waste of our uPortal resources to be required to render all of that 
 stuff all of the time. What about mimicking the portal home page 
 with a simpler technology like php, ruby, or django? Or is it not that 
 big of an issue to just let uPortal handle the load assuming we have 
 caching working on our side?

 Parker
 Programmer / Analyst
 Southern Utah University


 On 7/31/07, *George Lindholm* [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Hi all,
   I'm thinking about putting a static version of the guest page in
 front
 of our
 uPortal to minimize the guest sessions. So I just wondering what other
 sites have done and what their experiences have been?

 Thanks

George

 --
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]  
 ITServices, UBC
 Senior Programmer Analyst

 phone:604.822.4375   fax:  604.822.5116


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