The portal will be the new primary means of communication and access to information resources for all YC faculty, staff, and students. The term "gateway" is used quite frequently to describe a portal, as in the gateway to information.
The current website will continue to provide information for faculty, staff, students, and the community; however it will take on a more marketing/recruiting/community focus. It's likely that we'll begin removing some information from the main website and making it only accessible from within the portal.
With the introduction of the new Banner ERP system (replacing AMIS, ESS, and Administrative Access), implementing the portal provides for a number of benefits and improves the usability of the new student information system. The portal will also cut down on the "noise" that many of you notice in your email and on our website by ensuring that the information presented to you is relevant and timely.
The portal team is actually six working groups: Core, Content, Policy, Design & Usability, Communications & Training, and Technology & Integration. We have a total of 16 members actively involved on these teams and additional area representatives that we involve on an as-needed basis. At present, our active team membership includes individuals from: Academic Affairs (2), Student Affairs (2), BuCS/CISCO, Science & Math, HR(2), Office of Public Information, and ITS. This is truly a massive effort, as those involved can attest to. Consider that between March 1 and May 1, over 670 hours have been invested in meetings and planning efforts related to the portal. That's almost 700 hours in just over six weeks! It's truly a significant undertaking and we're doing our very best to ensure it gets the attention and resources it needs to be a successful project and one that we can all be proud of.
We actually already have a test installation available for internal use. We're currently working on updating that installation to meet our design standards and to add the content that our constituents have asked for. Beginning in early May, our official test installation will be installed, and in June our production portal server is scheduled for installation and configuration. It's too early for us to set an exact go-live date, but we expect to launch it this fall. As soon as we have a functional portal, we'll be sure to post screenshots and/or to invite you for demonstrations. We expect all staff, faculty, and students will be using the portal by Spring 2009.
You'll have more training opportunities than you can shake a stick at... =) Seriously, we've spent a lot of time evaluating successful and unsuccessful projects and we're extraordinarily committed to ensuring this is a very successful one. Training will be available in a variety of formats, both in-person and computer-based (e.g. video tutorials). We'll have more details in May or June.
No. Due to the order in which the ERP is being implemented, the portal will be launched first before anything else. As such, our ability to display and access certain information will be limited. For example, when fully-integrated, students can login to the portal and see grades and payment information on their student tab without having to click elsewhere or login again. This type of detail won't be available to use when we first launch, however there will be sufficient compelling content to ensure that everyone finds the new portal useful and usable when we first launch it. We don't intend to waste your time with a product that doesn't live up to the hype - we won't launch until we're satisfied that you'll be satisfied!
Send an email to portal@yc.edu and let us know you'd like to participate. You are welcome to join our team sessions to learn more or provide feedback about a particular topic or area. During this summer there will be opportunities for training, testing, etc.
Identifying all of the information to be housed in the portal, who will "own" it, how often it will be maintained, and similar questions are our major focus right now and are proving challenging simply because of the sheer volume of information. On a more technical note, we're working through issues attempting to integrate the portal with our current Electronic Student Services; implementing the new staff/faculty and student email platforms (and integrating with the portal); attempting to resolve questions related to having four calendaring systems in place at launch; and ensuring that the portal will remain compliant with our YC Web standards and with ADA and Section 508 compliance. That, and trying to provide day-to-day support to YC staff and faculty while being involved in meetings all day every day for the last month (and foreseeable future)... =)
While we've made every attempt to answer the most common questions, we've no doubt overlooked many. If you have a question you'd like answered, please send an email to portal@yc.edu with the subject line "QUESTION". We'll respond as quickly as we can and perhaps even add it to this page.