Drupal-based Portal – CLAC 2015 Conference

When: 3:15-4:00 PM, Wednesday, September 17, 2015
Where: Room 224, Oechsle Hall
Presenter: Ravi Ravishanker, CIO & Associate Dean for WellesleyX, Wellesley College

Wellesley College adopted Drupal as the Web CMS approximately three years ago and the College community has enthusiastically welcomed it and have been using it. LTS has developed high level expertise in supporting and extending Drupal in interesting ways. Wellesley has also been using Luminis portal from Ellucian for a while, more actively in the last 4 years.

However, in comparison to many of the technologies in use at the College, Luminis was seen as weak and feature poor. Upgrade to the next version of Luminis became inescapable. Though it is built on LifeRay, an open source portal framework, Ellucian seems to have a custom version of it. After examining the total cost of implementation, features etc. we decided to take the bold step of building our own portal in Drupal.

I will convey the story of how we decided to go in the direction of Drupal and how quickly we have been able to move forward. It is an exciting story that will inform other CLAC schools of what is possible in terms of open source software.

About the Presenter

Ravi Ravishankar is the CIO & Associate Dean for WellesleyX, Wellesley College. In this role, he leads the merged library and technology organization that provides a wide range of support for students, faculty, staff and increasingly alumnae. Ravi also leads the partnership with edX and is a member of the team that helped produce and run Wellesley’s four MOOCs.