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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. |
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