Who are you?

Andrew Petro
Senior Software Engineer
Unicon, Inc.

(Previously a casual systems programmer with Yale University ITS Technology and Planning)

 apetrounicon

Contact information

There's a contact form on Unicon.net that will be routed to me if your message is so addressed.

You can also email me at apetro at: unicon not-dot-com dot net.

What roles have you played in the uPortal community?

I have served as release engineer for the uPortal 2.5.x branch through uPortal 2.5.3 and for the 2.6.0 release. I now share release engineer responsibilities on the 2.6.x maintenance branch with Eric Dalquist.

I currently work for Unicon, Inc., with responsibilities including technical leadership in the cooperative support program as it applies to uPortal and consulting gigs from time to time.

Andrew, how can I get you to help me with my portal? And how can I support your being available to help out in the uPortal community?

I generally try to answer questions posed on the JA-SIG uPortal user and developer lists as time allows. Time does not always allow.

Unicon's new uPortal technical support program needs customers, and you probably need uPortal support, so I'd appreciate if you'd go ahead and buy that from Unicon. Thanks. This is a way to get help with your uPortal not just when I and other developers happen to get around to it, but on a more consistently timely and structured basis. Support cases that I am best able to work are routed to me under that program. Under the auspices of Cooperative Support, I regularly write knowledgebase articles and edit the JA-SIG wiki to improve documentation related to a support case worked. That word "Cooperative" is not just a marketing buzzword – it conveys the flavor of the program. We provide quality, personal, attentive, responsive technical support to subscribers to meet the needs of individual subscribers, absolutely, but we strive to do so in a way that cooperates with the larger context of the open source project. Where a question stems from a more general gap in documentation, we look to fill that gap. Where there's a bug, we look to open a Jira issue to document it, at the least, and if the customer chooses to fund development of a patch, that patch goes right into public issue tracking and/or source control. Further, the program affords a modest bandwidth of "cooperative development". We have a neat online facility whereby program participants can vote for the real public Jira issues, and these votes drive a priority queue of no-additional-charge community-participation development funded under the program, wherein Unicon looks to work those most important issues towards resolution.

The kind folks at Unicon do pay me a salary and thereby allow me to participate in uPortal as much as I do, so, if you're interested in supporting that participation, the thing to do is to go look at what Unicon's offering and see what you need. While it's not my department, I'd have to say the web developers who brand and skin uPortal and Sakai instances do a fantastic job. Give your portal a facelift and you can announce that you've released a whole new version. Feel free to add a line item "Support Andrew's work on opensource uPortal" to any statement of work you'd like.

I am regularly involved behind the scenes in Unicon consulting services gigs, so if you contract for services you just might be getting my assistance there too. From time to time I serve as the primary consultant on a project, especially smaller projects well-aligned with my interests and experience.

I understand you've written a few words about uPortal. Where might I find them?

Unicon has rolled out an exciting new hip website including blogs, so I'm now blogging there. I have written in the past off and on at Base Action URL, my personal blog about uPortal. For now, all new blogging is happening on Unicon's website. I also write knowledgebase articles.

I've written extensively on the JA-SIG email lists, which have public searchable archives.

I've written some of the content in this Confluence wiki and (probably more often) harvested from email discussion to create wiki pages. Though I spend far less time working on it than I would prefer, I am very excited about the uPortal Manual wiki space initiative.

I've been a frequent contributor, usually behind the scenes, to the JA-SIG Newsletter.

Is it true that Eric Dalquist was injured by beads at a JA-SIG Conference?

Yes. And there's a photo to prove it.

What are you currently working on in JA-SIG?

I'm currently between major initiatives. I got uPortal 2.6 out the door to deliver a modest evolutionary increment of presently available goodness and provide a good base for Eric Dalquist and others to pick things up to fix some further issues to deliver a 2.6.1 (look for that any day now) and to re-formulate the uPortal 3 initiative in terms of carrying uPortal 2.6 forward. I now fill in all sorts of administrivia, including serving on the JA-SIG Winter UnConference Committee and on the uPortal Steering Committee.

My JIRA tasks

Tasks I'm actively working on:

JASIG Issue Tracker (0 issues)
T	Key	Summary	Assignee	Reporter	Pr	Status	Res	Created	Updated	Due

Tasks assigned to me on which I'm not currently working:

JASIG Issue Tracker (16 issues)
T	Key	Summary	Assignee	Reporter	Pr	Status	Res	Created	Updated	Due
	TORO-91	Messaging/Notifications Portlet doesn't refresh view on message deletion	Andrew Petro	Nick Bolton		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 19, 2008	Aug 19, 2008
	TORO-60	@ symbol in usernames not supported in Briefcase Portlet	Andrew Petro	Andrew Petro		Open	UNRESOLVED	May 01, 2008	May 01, 2008
	TORO-59	Changes Permissible channels to reference Toro instead of Academus	Andrew Petro	Nick Bolton		Open	UNRESOLVED	Apr 24, 2008	Apr 24, 2008
	TORO-32	Installer fails when initializing CMS with SQL Server	Andrew Petro	Nick Bolton		Open	UNRESOLVED	Nov 28, 2007	Nov 28, 2007
	TORO-29	FileNotFoundException Reported when using installer for the first time	Andrew Petro	Chris Wagner		Open	UNRESOLVED	Nov 12, 2007	Nov 12, 2007
	TORO-27	Installer fails for tomcat paths that contain spaces	Andrew Petro	Nick Bolton		Open	UNRESOLVED	Nov 08, 2007	Nov 08, 2007
	TORO-26	Briefcase Portlet Permissions can not be locked down	Andrew Petro	Charise Arrowood		Open	UNRESOLVED	Nov 06, 2007	Nov 06, 2007
	TORO-25	Add SFTP resource factory to briefcase	Andrew Petro	Nick Bolton		Open	UNRESOLVED	Nov 02, 2007	Nov 02, 2007
	TORO-23	Calendar Chanel: Calendar not taking user to selected date	Andrew Petro	Nick Bolton		Open	UNRESOLVED	Oct 17, 2007	Oct 17, 2007
	TORO-21	Remove xsltc support from warlock portlets	Andrew Petro	Nick Bolton		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 31, 2007	Aug 31, 2007
	TORO-20	Notes field limitations- Usability improvements	Andrew Petro	Charise Arrowood		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 31, 2007	Aug 31, 2007
	TORO-11	Intermittently, users exclusively receiving ALM managed fragments cannot log in	Andrew Petro	Andrew Petro		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 08, 2007	Aug 08, 2007
	TORO-10	ant mergeUPortalConfiguration fails against uPortal 2.6 RC1 and RC2	Andrew Petro	michael irion		Open	UNRESOLVED	Aug 07, 2007	Aug 09, 2007
	TORO-2	alchemist hibernate schema is broken	Andrew Petro	Nick Bolton		Open	UNRESOLVED	Jun 15, 2007	Jun 15, 2007
	CASW-19	CAS protocol webpage link to CAS protocol Word document	Andrew Petro	Andrew Petro		Open	UNRESOLVED	May 26, 2006	May 26, 2006
	CASW-14	SAML and Shibboleth page	Andrew Petro	Andrew Petro		Open	UNRESOLVED	Feb 24, 2006	Mar 01, 2006