Luminis Platform 5.0 Statement for Jasig
Luminis Platform is a key SunGard HE component and will continue to be an important enabling technology and strategic offering for the company. The Luminis Platform solution has provided colleges and universities across the globe with a market leading platform for the aggregation of content, advanced personalization, content creation, content delivery, single sign-on capabilities, application integration, unified branding, community, collaboration, and so on. Using uPortal as the underlying portal server framework, the existing Luminis Platform offering has been able to make these functions relevant to higher education creating an advanced development and web services delivery platform for schools to showcase their content, applications and overall innovation.
The next major release, Luminis Platform 5.0, builds on the system’s existing value and core competencies and introduces a product and technology strategy that includes key architecture and technology enhancements, a focus on competing content, applications and tools, an advanced collaboration and community environment, increased deployment and configuration flexibility, and further alignment within the SunGard Higher Education solution set.
In addition to the baseline offering against the LifeRay portal server, Luminis Platform 5.0 will provide a certified reference implementation for uPortal starting with version 3.x. This provides choice and flexibility at the portal server layer as well as support for schools who do not use the Luminis Platform but rather have deployed the native uPortal product. These schools will now have a framework to consume various Luminis Platform applications such as Luminis Channels for Banner and integrate with the Luminis Platform solution in ways not available today.
Luminis Platform has always focused on providing interoperability where appropriate and LP 5.0 takes this a bit further by isolating the Luminis Platform applications through services orientation. This effectively separates the Luminis Platform-built applications from the rest of the infrastructure resulting in the reduction of development and testing overhead related to non-competing areas of the product such as the portal server and other underlying areas. It provides the ability for Luminis Platform to place focus on competing components of the offering such as services delivery, content, collaboration, community and Higher Education specific tools, applications and processes.
As of Q4 2008, the existing Luminis Platform solution that is based on the uPortal open-source framework has been adopted by over 700 clients worldwide. This growth is expected to accelerate over the next several years and support for uPortal will continue as noted in support of this growth. The next major version of the solution is Luminis Platform 5.0 due out in early 2010.