It's the End of Luminis As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Prior to Summit, on the eve of the release of Luminis IV, there were rumors spreading that Luminis' future as a portal built on a uPortal architecture was seriously in doubt. The rumors indicated that Luminis was going to undergo a radical transformation and be rebuilt on Oracle portal.

At the UDC kickoff session at Summit, this seemed to be confirmed; Brian Maddox, Sungard CEO, announced that Sungard had come to a wide ranging agreement with Oracle to standardize on Oracle middleware. Although this includes a number of components, the one that caught my eye was (naturally) the inclusion of Oracle portal.

This did bother me. Part of my concerns were simply based on my lack of knowledge of Oracle portal. How does Oracle portal integrate into other systems; do they have something similar to CPIP or GCF? Does it support JSR 168? While the answer to these questions are surely interesting; they are also practical. How much time should client Universities spend on customizing an architecture present in Luminis IV that Sungard has already slated for death?

I was also bothered by concerns that were far more personal. I'd be lying if I told you I didn't experience a sinking sensation when it was rumored we would have to throw out all the work we had done with Luminis over the last few years to support a brand new architecture.

My concerns though, were based on more than simply the threat of years of lost productivity on the behalf of myself and my team. I'm sure you all have your own stories on how you arrived with Luminis. At Hofstra, we had evaluated a number of portals that interoperated well with our existing technology. Luminis was one of several finalists. One of the deciding factors for our choice of Luminis was that it was based on uPortal-an open source portal being developed expressly with Universities in mind. To purchase a portal based on uPortal and after purchase being told we're getting Oracle portal instead made me feel like Sungard had beaten us at a game of three card monty.

At one of the sessions at Summit (I think it was 'Peek-A-Portal') one of the panelists stated that you might not like Luminis directly out of the box; but one of its great strengths was that you could customize (and hack) it to serve the needs of your institution. I'm sure this isn't news to any developer who frequents LumDev. But imagine if Luminis was based on a closed source solution; that customizations were difficult or impossible. That out of the box was what you got.

You can see why I was worried.

But later at Summit, I was reassured when Sungard representatives stated unequivocally that Luminis V (tentatively scheduled for release sometime in 2009) would support *BOTH* architectures. I was surprised at this for a few reasons. Primarily, with my admittedly limited knowledge about such things, it doesn't seem that Luminis really has 'an abstraction layer' that would allow it to easily run on both platforms. This will undoubtedly take some serious development work. Secondly, I was a bit surprised simply from a resource allocation perspective; two platforms means twice as much work-for development and for support.

With all that being said, Sungard reiterated their commitment to uPortal and said it is their intention to run on both platforms for Luminis V. Hopefully, in the meantime, developers on LumDev can continue to demonstrate in the coming years why having an open source platform is truly worthwhile.