Taming the Beast Managing an Enterprise Portal Jim Helwig JA-SIG uPortal Conference June 13, 2005 Copyright @ 2005 The University of Wisconsin Board of.

Taming the BeastTaming the Beast

Managing an Enterprise PortalManaging an Enterprise Portal

Jim Helwig

JA-SIG uPortal Conference

June 13, 2005Copyright @ 2005 The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents

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Hurray, it’s live!!!

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The honeymoon is over; Houston, we have a problem…

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How can we improve the chances for success?

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Areas to consider…

• Organization

• Communication

• User feedback

• Politics

• Testing

• Code migration

• Maintenance

• Monitoring

• Log analysis

• Support

• Outage tracking

• Performance

• Reliability

• Statistics

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About My UW-Madison

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About My UW-Madison

• Created in 2000

• 55,000 students, faculty, staff

• 15,000+ unique customers per day

• 1,000+ concurrent customers

• 100+ modules

• 8-10 FTE developers and administrators

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Organization

• Advisory group

• Tab teams

• Service team

• Development groups

• Portal infrastructure group

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Communication

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CommunicationMUM Advisory Group

John Peterson

Migration Project Manager

Jim Helwig

Other Interested Parties

RO’s officeTech Partners

DoIT Help DeskMy-dev list

My-mumprodMy-mumqa

E-InfrastructureGroup

Bill Scheuerell

DoIT Communications

Brian Rust

DoIT CIO Office

MUM Service Team Leader

Annette Stratman-Durrer

MUM SponsorsJohn PetersonBill Scheuerell

Infrastructure Issues

Tab Issues

Timeline/Project Plan

Overall Look and Feel

Module Development

Policy Issues

MUM Service Team

Annette Stratman-Durrer

My FrontpageAl FriedmanNick Weaver

AcademicKathy Christoph

LibraryCarrie Kruse

Campus LifeTrey Duffy

FinancialSusan FischerCathie Hanlon

Student Record EnrollmentJoanne BergJim Steele

ResourcesJohn Peterson

Work RecordDon MinerDon Schutt

Tab sub committees

AcademicTim Aucremann

My FrontpageBrian Rust

Student RecordFinancial

EnrollmentOzzyie Chen

ResourcesWork RecordBrian Busby

MUM Tech Forum

Jim Phelps

UIUENick Weaver

Portal Infrastructure

Jim Helwig

Core migration groups

POST Middleware DRMT Networking

Auxiliary migration groups

Tab technical teams

Tech

nica

l Gro

ups

Adm

inis

trativ

e C

omm

ittee

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My UW-Madison Migration Project – Communication Flow

Testing Issues

General Development Technical Issues

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CommunicationEmail lists

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CommunicationWeb site

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CommunicationWiki

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User Feedback

• Annual surveys

• Focus groups

• Web form

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Politics

• Diverse campus, independent departments

• Service provider priorities

• Senior management goals

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Testing

• User

• Unit

• Integrated

• Load

• Accessibility

• Regression

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Testing

Test case management tool

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Code Migration

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Maintenance

• Weekly window

• Ad hoc if necessary

• Rolling restart for transparency

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%&#*!! It Broke!

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Monitoring

• General purpose “watchdog”

• Wily Introscope

• hpOpenView

• Administrative portlets

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Log analysis

• Developer access to logs

• Nightly exception summary

• Need to get rid of cruft

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Support

• Customer support

– Knowledge base

– Help Desk

– 2nd level technicians

• Developer support

– Email

– Jira

• Contracted support

– Unicon for uPortal

– JBoss for Tomcat

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Outage Tracking

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Try not to break it in the first place

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Performance

• Database tuning

• JVM tuning

• Portlet tuning

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Reliability

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Statistics

• https://my-team.doit.wisc.edu/stats/

• User logins, total and unique

• Concurrent users

• Tab usage and timing

• Module usage and timing

• Web log stats

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Questions?

Jim HelwigUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison

[email protected]

my.wisc.edu