Portal News: January 2010 Archives

It’s been almost 2 months since we began rolling myUChicago out to students across the University and in that time we’ve received many comments, suggestions, and recommendations.

A recurring theme in many of your comments is the desire to have more functionality integrated into myUChicago itself, rather than just aggregate links that launch to other University sites. There are 2 responses to this and I want to use this post to address them both.

1: We’re not reinventing the wheel, just making it run smoother
Part of myUChicago’ s function is to make it easier to find and access University information and systems that already exist. It is not the goal of myUChicago to replace robust systems already designed to perform a range of important tasks (like registration, email, and calendaring). Rather, the goal is to make it easier to use the resources that are already out there.

We want you to be able to find exactly what you need without searching, digging, hitting dead ends, or opening twenty tabs to complete a single task. And myUChicago was designed to be a big piece of that puzzle.

So will the links stay? In a word: yes. Are they going to be the only way to access information in myUChicago? Well … no. Which brings us to point number two.

2: This is only the beginning
One of the most important things to remember about myUChicago is that it is in its infancy. The recent launch for students—and forthcoming faculty and staff launches—marks the beginning of a project with a long life expectancy and equally long development cycle. So what’s that mean in English? It means that we will continue to measure user feedback and statistics to determine what integrated functionality will be most useful to the most people, and then put the things that make the most sense in over time.

Right now there are several portlets with some form of integrated functionality, including RSS feeds, Bookmarks, Course Information, Personal contact information, Weather, Announcements, and Alerts, to name a few. We are working to get even more dynamic content into myUChicago and will keep you updated as development progresses.

Your input makes a difference
A big part of the development process is the feedback we get from you as a user. So feel free to tell us what you think. Continue to share what you like, what you don’t, and what we can do to make myUChicago even more useful. We aren’t promising every request will make it into the site, but we can guaranty your voice will be heard.