Work done in the Sakai VRE Demonstrator has extended and made Sakai more usable in an e-Research context. Six extensions to the Sakai VLE framework have been carried out as described below.

• Shibboleth Integration. Shibboleth will allow VRE users to authenticate in the same way as they do to see other JISC-supported resources such as information repositories. The following diagram of the way authentication works when users follow links between protected resources on VREs. http://wiki.oss-watch.ac.uk/SakaiVre/VREDiagram. More information about Shibboleth and use cases is shown here: http://wiki.oss-watch.ac.uk/SakaiVre. For details of resources in the Shibboleth Federation see http://www.ukfederation.org.uk/content/Documents/AvailableServices .
• Web Services for Remote Portlets Integration. This is the primary mechanism we are currently using to access Computational Grid resources from Sakai. We use the JSR-168 portlets from the National Grid Service Portal which are hosted remotely. These portlets are tried and tested by the NGS user community and permit sharing of application descriptions via standard JSDL.
• Agora Communication Technology. Agora is being developed to support a suite of communication tools for Sakai.
• JSR-168. This is the Java portlet standard. Work is ongoing to include native JSR-168 support in Sakai by integrating Pluto 1.1 and Charon.
• Web Bridging Technologies. This has been investigated to link to legacy applications written in languages such as Perl, Python and PHP.
• Groupware Bridging Technologies. This has been investigated to access and share Personal Information, e.g. from institutional Microsoft Exchange servers.

In the table below we will add information about tools which are under development. These tools are being developed by members of an informal Portlets Alliance, or are being integrated by them into portal frameworks using portlet interfaces, e.g. Sakai. Here is further information on the Portlets Alliance.

The tools which we have proposed to port include the following. We would like to hear from other developers who are porting the same or different tools so that we can include their information in these pages.

• Search Tools: (Oxford) Context-based Information Retrieval, Collection Cross Search, Google Web service interface, Application Discovery, Scientific Data Query, UDDI. tools as appropriate.
• Collaboration/ Discussion: (Lancaster) IRC (Internet Relay Chat), Blog, Research Scheduler, Video Conferencing, Distributed Whiteboard, Distributed Display.
• Anaysis Tools: (Daresbury) Scientific Calculator, Active Spreadsheet, Statistical Computing, Data Management, Simple Visualisation, Grid Information, Network Information, Grid computing.
• Publication/ Documentation: (Portsmouth) Word Processor, Distributed Presentation Tool, Bibliography Builder, XHTML Editor, LaTeX Processor, Simple Interactive Plotting, Project Publication, Application Publishing.
• Others: (Daresbury) Portal Statistics, Personal Information Manager, Shopping Cart, Bugzilla, CVS, Authorisation Policy Management.
• Training and Awareness: (Lancaster) Research Assistant and Personal Information Guide (PIG), CopperCore Tool, Tool Templates, Documentation Manager, Helpdesk interface.

We are seeking to involve the National e-Science Centre, NeSC in hosting a portlet repository and the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute, OMII in using Sakai similarly to how CHEF is being use for the US National Middleware Initiative.

Some downloads are currently available from here.

Table cells are colour coded: Pale orange means a tool or information is under development, pale green means that is exists, white means there is nothing available. A Red cell is for a tool where development has been abandoned as part of the QA procedure. We will put tools under development at the top of the list so you can easily see news of the latest work. This means that the further down the list you go, the more green areas should appear, and documentation too!