My UW-Madison Portal System Infrastructure

The My UW-Madison portal is comprised of many different applications and systems. These include the NetID Login Service, the University Directory Service, the primary portal infrastructure, database servers and many web applications.

The NetID Login Service, implemented using PubCookie, provides single sign-on authentication for My UW-Madison and other web applications such as WiscMail, WiscCal, My WebSpace, DARS, etc. The University Directory Service (UDS), implemented using Sun’s iPlanet LDAP server, provides information about the portal user, such as name, employee or student ID, employing department, etc. This information is used to determine the user’s roles and provide personalized content.

The primary portal infrastructure consists of eight Sun servers behind a virtual address (my.wisc.edu, managed by the Layer 4 hardware). This provides load balancing for increased capacity as well as fail over during maintenance or service problems. The portal servers use many Open Source software packages, including Apache, Tomcat, Java and uPortal. Applications running natively in the portal are implemented as JSR-168 portlets. System configuration, user customization information and usage metrics are stored in an Oracle portal database.

Individual portal applications (aka modules or portlets) may access other systems. Some use data from other campus systems or databases (e.g., Integrated Student Information System (ISIS), InfoAccess data warehouse) to deliver content directly within the portal (e.g., Campus News, Earnings Statement). Others applications run remotely but have content displayed within the portal (e.g., Weather). Still others provide secure access links to external systems (e.g., Student Center). Finally, some applications both display within the portal and provide secure links directly to the application (e.g., Course Resources, WiscMail, WiscCal).