24 Jul UW-Madison open source project shares national IT honor
Madison, Wis. – The uPortal Project, an information technology collaboration in which the University of Wisconsin-Madison has played a leading role, is the winner of 2007 Catalyst Award from EDUCAUSE.
uPortal, a broad-based initiative that has developed a free, sharable Web portal for use in higher education, enables higher education institutions to organize information and deliver it online to students, faculty, and staff based on user interests and access rights.
Jim Helwig of UW-Madison’s Division of Information Technology (DoIT) and project manager of DoIT’s portal infrastructure team, said in a statement that uPortal, an open-source system, continues to expand its user base.
As part of an organization called the Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JA-SIG), UW-Madison and other institutions began to develop uPortal in the late 1990s. They recognized that portals and other software can be difficult and expensive to build, and they started to develop flexible, functional software to meet common needs.
EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit organization founded to advance higher education through the use of information technology.
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