Design considerations for developing e-University solutions based on open source software

Academic institutions that offer wide ranges of digital educational, administrative and informational services to various categories of users are likely to face the problem of proper service and content organization. The Technological Educational Institute of Crete aims to take advantage of the various recent open source technologies in the field of infrastructure services and portals in order to create an e-University platform that will concentrate and harmonize the access to all digital content and educational services offered by its Departments, labs and Schools. The new site is required to include custom components that accommodate personalization for all types of users and also provide a generic and open environment for future development. This paper discusses the requirements that need to be considered for the construction of such a service and also proposes an architectural design that exploits pieces of infrastructure that must be available within campuses such as catalogs of users, central authentication services and federation services.