Students have probably recently seen around campus a new onslaught of posters and tent cards advertising The Carnegie Mellon Web Portal. The Portal (http://my.cmu.edu) is, according to the greeting on the opening page, “a customizable platform for collaboration and communication for the extended university community.”

Using the Portal, you can access a seemingly endless number of resources, such as the New York Times, local weather, stock market quotes, your current meal plan and campus express balance, university events, campus news, Blackboard, information on textbooks, the library card catalogue, b-boards, and e-mail, among other things.

The Portal project was approved in March of 2003, to be fully operational by August 2003. The Web Implementation Team was assembled to help design, publish, and evaluate information to be used in the project, as well as to work with academic departments, clubs, the University, and Student Government to create a product that would work best for members of the entire campus. With little advertising, the Portal arrived last fall, and currently has 1,000 unique users each week, about 700 of which are students.

“For what is essentially a prolonged beta release and just on word of mouth, [we] don’t feel bad about it at all,” explained Doug Blair, project manager for Web Services and Computer Services.

He is in charge of the publishing infrastructure of the Portal. The recent advertising campaign is an attempt to increase usage.

“We’re trying to make people aware that the portal is here,” Blair said, “and that it is a resource available to you.”

When you first enter the Web Portal (you must access it through WebISO with your AndrewID and password), the site greets you by your first name. At the top, you have five tabs from which to choose: Home, Academics, Campus Life, Campus Services, and My Tab. Each of these tabs allows you to customize both the content and layout of a series of ‘portlets,’ or subscriptions, that deal with each of the categories. These portlets are essentially smaller sections of important websites that students often access, such as the Cameo library search box and Blackboard. There is also a customizable Events Calendar where you can track the activities of any of the participating clubs or academic venues.

“I think it’s a smart idea to put academic information and information about things to do on and around campus all on the same web page,” said Beth Kupin, a sophomore math and art student, as she perused the Portal for the first time.

“We asked campus: ‘How do you use the web today and what can we make better about that experience?’” explained Blair. “What [the campus body] want[s] is a page that’s composed just for you; that’s the whole idea of a portal.”

“I’d like it to be easier for the first-time user,” said Dwight Bussman, a senior information systems major.

The Web Implementation Team is already taking steps to ensure this. They intend to include introductory pages to serve as a tutorial for first-time users that will alert them to all the different information and resources that are available on the site. The Computer Skills Workshop (CSW) class will also cover how to effectively use and explore the Portal.

“The page works,” Bussman added, “but is missing some links that would be helpful and quickly directs users away from the homepage without an easy way back. It would work better if, when you launch a page that doesn’t have a link back to my.cmu.edu, it launches within a window, whether that be a separate window or a portion of the primary page.”

The Portal has had many improvements since it’s opening in the fall. It has more available news feeds, personal meal plan and campus express balances, the Cameo search engine, and both Book BuyBack and Course Textbook information from the bookstore. But The Web Implementation Team isn’t stopping there.

“The fall is going to be a significantly different portal experience,” said Blair. “One of the things that we didn’t have time to build out the way we’d like is the design.”

The Portal team has been working avidly with Office of Technology Education (OTE) and more specifically with one of their members, Judy Brooks, who has designed a new Portal layout to be available in the fall. They collected feedback from students, faculty, and staff to compile a detailed body of information that described how members of the campus community use the web on a day-to-day basis. This allowed the Team to make decisions regarding the improvement of the information architecture and interface design for the Portal.

“From an interface standpoint, we [want] to support understanding and usability of the content and services provided within the portal and to house that content in a warm and welcoming space. Something easy on the eye, but with empahsis where needed,” said Brooks.

“In general, [it will be] a lot less tense, a lot less boxy, a little more white space. We tried to simplify and consolidate,” Blair explained.

A My Accounts tab will also be added to give students access to University resources that are specific to the student, such as Student Information Online (SIO) data.

Another plan is to make the platform available to all Carnegie Mellon campuses, both the West Coast campus and the one in Qatar, as well as extending the Portal’s services and population to prospective students and alumni.

“I think a great idea would be if, when you register your computer with the network, it assigns the portal as your default homepage to make the Portal more visible to students, with the hope of making the Portal become a more integral part of CMU and its student body,” suggested Ray Obico, a first-year mechanical engineering student.

Blair explained, in response, that this may not be possible because the default homepage of a browser is set by the individual, but because of the steps that are being taken towards making the page more accessible and publicized, students might choose to make it their default homepage.

“That’s really useful,” Evan Tahler, a sophomore mechanical engineering student, said of the new Portal, “I wish I’d known about it sooner.”

If you would like to give feedback to the Web Implementation Team about the portal, or if you'd like to join the group, fill out the suggestion box located on the Portal site.