August 30, 2005
UMBC Launches "Sneak Peek" of New Homepage
Today, UMBC is providing a "sneak peek" of its new homepage, which begins the process of redesigning UMBC's entire web presence by summer 2006. If you'd like to comment on the new homepage or the process for developing the site to follow, use the comment form below.
Posted by fritz at 11:33 AM | Comments (27)
OIT Portal Group Working on New myUMBC
When it launched in 1999, myUMBC was one of the first university portals and (at the time) it was cutting edge technology. But over the years it has been showing its age.
For the past few months, OIT’s New Media and SysCore groups have been focused on creating a new "myUMBC" environment, working with an open-source portal called "uPortal" (http://www.uportal.org), which has been developing over the past few years as a mature portal platform. Targeted specifically at higher education, institutions like Princeton, Duke, University of Delaware and Virginia Tech have chosen uPortal; many of which have similar technologies in-place, such as Blackboard and PeopleSoft.
Switching to a platform such as uPortal will allow us to integrate other technologies into the myUMBC experience, quite often without directly engaging programming talent.
“We have been enjoying a collaborative development with New Media,” says Rob Banz, coordinator of Core Systems and architect of the UMBC user directory. “While we have been working on the integration and infrastructure of the system, they have been setting up the layout, design, and population of content. In the previous incarnation of myUMBC, such a cross-group collaboration would have been difficult, if not impossible.”
A few weeks ago, OIT’s portal group announced general availability of the "pre beta" new portal. Style, design, integration -- basically everything -- is still incomplete. But to get some feedback as to what people think, the portal group set up a blog at http://www.umbc.edu/oit/webdev/news where you can ask questions, make comments, and read about current development efforts.
The new portal will launch in "beta" on or around September 19, but for now here are some screen shots of what you might see for the personal, academic and business services tabs.
Posted by fritz at 10:39 AM | Comments (4)