Main | UMBC Launches "Sneak Peek" of New Homepage »
August 30, 2005
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 August 30, 2005 10:39 AM
Comments
This is an improvement by looking neater and more organized than the current home page. Too bad you couldn't find something more suggestive of higher learning and inspirational toward personal and public improvement. The bulletin board theme shows a lack of imagination and inspiration.
Have you checked the sites of other institutions of higher learning for ideas?
CJB
Posted by: charles bondi at August 30, 2005 3:57 PM
Screenshots look nice :-)
Open Source == Good... if done right.
Posted by: Loogi at August 30, 2005 7:58 PM
looks good for now. have to see how it will work though. maybe try to have more webdesign students involved in the process
Posted by: nikki at November 21, 2005 3:41 PM
curious if there was any way of viewing future course schedules (for example, spring 2006) without clicking over to the old interface.
Posted by: sudhir desai at January 17, 2006 1:21 PM