Easy access
A new Web portal under development will enable Illinois students to access secured applications, resources and information on the campus home page. Todd Nelson (right), executive project coordinator for Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services, is leading the Portal Team. Tim Carroll is the technical lead for the project.
Move over, Illini Guides.
Incoming undergraduate students for the fall semester have a new guide to help them find their way around the Urbana campus community – the online community, that is.
My.illinois is a Web portal under development that will enable Illinois students to access secured applications, resources and information on the campus Web. Through the portal, students will have a single resource to register for classes, request transcripts, access financial aid and course-management applications such as Illinois Compass, and browse through the University Library’s materials. Students – and faculty and staff members when the faculty/staff portal is developed later – will be able to access applications such as online calendars, RSS feeds, university announcements and e-mail without having to log in to each application separately.
Default pages, content and layouts are being created for specific user groups. However, users will be able to customize their interface within the defaults, selecting from among the available applications and functions they wish to have at their fingertips to get unique and personal views of the campus Web.
Todd Nelson, executive project coordinator, is leading the Portal Team in Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services, which is designing the portal and working with teams at each of the three campuses to configure and implement it. Portal advisory committees at each of the three campuses are branding and customizing the application to suit the unique needs of their user groups. Common functions such as registration that all three campuses are interested in are being developed for communal use.
“The critical part of implementing the my.illinois portal is collaborating with groups on the three campuses,” Nelson said. “Administrative Information Technology Services and New Student Programs at the Urbana campus have made significant contributions, and we look forward to collaborating with more campus units to enhance the portal. We want to provide a useful, organized and customizable resource for the university community.”
The hardware, databases and networking between CITES and the University Office of Administrative Information Technology Services have been completed, initial layouts have been created, and basic database queries to control and customize access are in place.
The Urbana and Chicago campuses have implemented prototypes of their portals with a select group of new students. About 6,000 incoming freshmen and transfer students at Urbana are accessing the I Start applications, at www.istart.uiuc.edu by means of the portal. Additionally, 5,000 incoming students at the Chicago campus this semester are using UIC’s portal. Officials at the Springfield campus expect to have the system online for all their students this summer.
CITES’ Network Development Group has developed several portal applications to assist IT professionals on campus with network monitoring tools. The applications are in beta testing and will be released to a larger audience later this month.
The portal team’s goal is to implement the Urbana campus portal for all incoming freshmen and transfer students in 2008, and for all students in 2009. Resources for faculty and staff members will be developed once all students are using the portal.
The University Technology Management Team, which comprises the chief information officers at the three UI campuses and the director of AITS, is sponsoring the portal.
The portal is being developed with uPortal, open-source software designed for the higher education community and collaboratively developed by several universities that are members of the Java Architecture Special Interest Group. Among the U.S. institutions that have implemented uPortal are the University of California system, Duke University and Yale University.
