Hi all, I wanted to open a discussion around some of the notifications-type use cases we're starting to explore as part of the uMobile project. The excellent new notifications (from University of Manchester) and alerts (in the Jasig Widget Portlets) portlets have inspired a lot of thought about how these new portlets fit together with each other, with the announcements portlet, and with the portal as a whole.
The Notifications Portlet as it exists now aggregates person-specific (rather than group) notifications from external services. It's similar to the calendar or news portlets in that it merges together data from disparate sources, and does not allow administrators to create content directly in the portal. I think this looks like a great new portlet, and I've been wondering if we should think about extending it and make it a core part of uMobile / uPortal. In the case of something like courses, we have a courses portlet that might display notifications inside of it (course-specific announcements or forum updates, perhaps). We then also have a notifications portlet that might want to display course announcements. As things currently work, we might also write a plugin the LMS to display course notifications in the notifications portlet aggregated view. In this use case, it seems like it might be interesting to use a portlet event-based model like what we're using for the uPortal search API. Under this strategy, instead of having to develop an additional courses plugin for the notifications portlet, the courses portlet could publish notices to the notifications portlet via the event API. We could similarly publish to the notifications portlet from the announcements portlet, the emergency alerts portlet, etc. If we had this in place, I think the notifications portlet could take a center-stage role in both uPortal and uMobile as a terrific integration point and source of information for displaying good dashboard information. Does this sound like an attractive idea to others? Does the events model sound like a good fit? The other notification-related thought I wanted to mention is that we might want to explore having a way to create notifications from within uPortal. It would be neat to be able to use uPortal's existing person selection interface to select a user, then send a manual notification. Of course, this integration might require either making the portlet a framework portlet or connecting to a uPortal person REST service. - Jen -- You are currently subscribed to [email protected] as: [email protected] To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, see http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/uportal-dev
