Welcome to the the portal newsletter - which is the by-product and a communication tool of the portal conference, first held at Gettysburg College in June of 2006. With more than 150 people attending and a keynote address by Dr. Ali Jafari, IUPUI, the inaugural portal conference demonstrated a desire by the higher education community to come together to discuss all aspects of portals in an informal campus setting.

The June 2007 conference brought together almost 200 people and featured a collection of portal experts getting together to work with Nicole Engelbert from DataMonitor on a "Best Practices" whitepaper, which is available from DataMonitor (www.datamonitor.com). The keynote address was offered by Dr. Dennis Trinkle, CIO of Valparasio University, and discussed the future of the portal.

Portal 2008 featured a keynote address by Jim Farmer of Georgetown University, an all-conference presentation by Ray Henderson from Angel Learning and 28 presentations and 3 panel discussions. For more information, check the website.

The annual portal conference at Gettysburg College brings together the community every June, but the questions and discussions about portals doesn't happen once a year - it happens year round. A newsletter seemed like a perfect tool to help communicate among institutions a few more times each year, and to share items from the conference as well as help to shape the next edition of the conference.

The idea is to publish three issues of the newsletter a year - October to coincide with Educause; February to help announce the portal conference program, and June as part of the portal conference. Not everyone has time to come to the conference or others realize they have something to offer after attending the conference, so the newsletter will provide opportunities for people to share their stories with others and create another venue for information.

The plan is to have the issues both in electronic form and paper and to have the electronic version be searchable and with more content than the paper version. This initial offering became more rushed than hoped as other work commitments competed for the time (we all know that situtation). Looked for more enhanced versions in later issues.

If you have a story to share, submit it to the portal newsletter. There is a community out there interested in hearing how others have done something with a portal, from implementation, to integration and then to enhancement.

Portal 2009 is scheduled for June 2-5, 2009 at the Gettysburg College campus. The theme is users, uses, usability to help focus the conference on the portal customer.