This document summarizes Jennifer Bourey's presentation on uMobile, an open source mobile platform for higher education institutions. uMobile provides a unified experience across native mobile apps and mobile web for students, faculty, staff and visitors. It offers personalized content through authentication and role-based personalization. uMobile is built on the mature Jasig open source portal framework and integrates with existing campus systems through open standards. Its web-centric approach allows content to be developed once and delivered across platforms.

1. uMobile
Taking Mobile Applications and Devices to the
Next Level
Jennifer Bourey, Unicon
BCNet Conference 2012

2. Common Themes to Date
Student or visitor-focused
Cater to campus life use cases
News, events
Maps, transportation
Maybe some course features
Often no authentication or personalization

3. Current Challenges

4. Diverse Audiences
Students
Provide course resources, grades, schedules
Support campus life and activities
Faculty and Staff
Payroll information, administrative resources

5. Diverse Audiences
Prospective Students
Admissions sessions and deadlines
Visitor parking
Alumni
Increase engagement and donations

6. Content Creation
Many departments want to publish mobile content
Departments have varying resources, technical
expertise
Need for delegated authoring, administration

7. Development
Must develop code separately for each platform,
mobile web
Requires developers to work with new and diverse
technologies
New APIs for mobile modules
May change rapidly
Might not offer enough flexibility

8. Complex Integration
Requirements
Complex higher ed environments
Data resides in many different systems
One university many have many campuses, schools
Complex audience
Diverse user populations
Users with overlapping roles

9. Collaboration Challenges
Desire for collaboration
Every university is
different!
Harder to share open-
source code effectively
Graphic copyright Educause
Mobile IT in Higher Education, 2011
http://www.educause.edu/MobileITinHigherEducation

10. App Distribution
Must republish to make even minor changes to app
Submission process adds delay, reduces control
Potential for mismatch between server and app

11. Introducing uMobile

12. uMobile is a Campus Solution
Delivers rich mobile campus platform for:
Visitors
Recruits
Students
Faculty
Staff
Alumni

13. uMobile is Native
iPhone Android

14. uMobile is Web
webOS 1.4.1+
Android 1.5+
iOS 2.2.1+ Windows Mobile 6.5.1+
(via Opera)
bada 1.0+ MeeGo 1.1

15. uMobile is open source
Developed directly in Jasig control with all source code
available under Apache Software License 2.0
Maintained by a community of developers governed by
the Jasig uMobile Steering Committee
This is real open source enterprise software (i.e. no
separate proprietary version that requires a licensing
fee)

16. uMobile is Higher Ed
uMobile builds on Jasig’s experience in enterprise
higher education integration portals
Sophisticated and mature framework for
personalization, aggregation, access control,
integration, and administration
Production instances supporting millions of users
uMobile can be adopted stand-alone or as an
extension of a “traditional” enterprise portal

18. Personalizing the Mobile
Experience

19. Authentication
Display user-specific information
Calendars, course schedules
Support single sign-on to other mobile university
websites

20. Role-based Content
Use existing campus roles to drive personalized
content
Potential data sources
LDAP, Active Directory, Grouper
Local (app-specific) group definitions
Attribute-based ad-hoc groups
Use roles to distribute both module list and content
within modules

21. Customization
Improve app usefulness and user engagement by
allowing users to override defaults
Toggle optional calendar, news feeds
Select defaults and favorites
Add/remove optional content modules
Integrate with any desktop-side portal customizations

22. Authorization
Control permissions on modules and module content
Support privacy and data protection
Protected department resources
Directory data

23. Integrating with Campus
Resources

24. Development Strategy
Where possible, support open data formats
Enable common implementations out of the box
Publish open APIs for custom integrations

25. Standards-based Development
Enable single sign-on
CAS, Shibboleth
Consume common data formats
RSS, iCal
Support common user attribute and group data
sources
LDAP, Active Directory, Grouper

26. SIS
DB
Moodle Sakai

27. Easing Development and
Distribution

28. Native App Challenges
Unfamiliar and varied technology, dev environments
iOS: Cocoa
Android: Java
Need to implement a feature multiple times
Publishing apps takes time and effort
Still need another strategy for mobile browsers
Hard to leverage existing investment

29. A Better Strategy
What if we could . . .
Write features once
Using familiar technology
While offering both native and browser-based views
And re-using existing application logic

30. Web-Centric Content
Single codebase produces all mobile views
Multiple native applications
Multiple mobile web browsers
No update to the mobile client app required
Familiar development environment
Potentially share logic with desktop functionality

31. Native components
provide navigation
WebView presents
markup from portal

32. Multiple Views
Often need a different feature or interface on one
platform
Share backend logic as much as possible
Business logic
Controllers
Render separate view layers as needed
Separate layout / CSS for desktop, tablet, mobile
May need to omit chrome from native views

33. Multiple Views
Controller
View Resolver Model
Desktop Mobile
View View

34. Calendar Views
Desktop
in-page
Tablet
Phone

35. Native App Codebase
Based on Titanium Appcelerator
JavaScript-based platform-independent
development framework
Compile shared codebase to iPhone and Android
applications with native controls
Open source under the Apache 2.0 License

36. Native Components via
REST
REST services provide JSON data for
User layout
Map data
Contacts information
REST feeds can easily be created for other areas

37. uMobile
Server
Request data from Return location
uPortal map service data as JSON
Present native components
uMobile based on portal data
App

38. Portlet-based Content
JSR-168 / JSR-286 portlet standards
Enables collaboration beyond uMobile project
Google Gadget integration
Alternate language modules
Provides a familiar, well-defined development model
Assures modules will work across uMobile versions

39. External Content
Leverage existing mobile investment
Allow departments to develop and control their own
content
Enable web-based development in other frameworks
Include external content via WebView, IFrame,
WebProxy

40. Application Skinning

41. Administrative Access

44. Data Migration
Statistics
Cache Management Content Creation

45. Looking Ahead
Augmented reality map integration
Enhanced course and grades portlet
Custom mobile layouts
Additional native app platforms

46. uMobile is Unique
Truly Free & Open Source Software
Provides Native App and Mobile Web
Provides personalized experience and information
Build on mature, proven, scalable, enterprise
integration portal framework
Ready for deployment at your campus now
No other platform has all of these characteristics

47. More Resources
Jasig uMobile web site
jasig.org/umobile
YouTube channel
youtube.com/jasigumobile
uMobile Manual
wiki.jasig.org/display/umobile

48. Questions?
Jennifer Bourey
jbourey@unicon.net