uPortal as self-service portal platform
Someone asked me recently whether I think uPortal is a good platform for delivering a self-service portal. My answer is that it is, and in this blog post I explain why and give examples of how it has already been used to deliver such experiences.
uPortal is commonly successfully adopted as a self-service portal platform.
For instance, Rutgers University uses uPortal as a platform to deliver file sharing services, views on transcript level and within-course grades, single sign on to multiple learning management systems, views on course schedules and the course catelog, library catalog and resource search, answers to commonly asked questions and how-tos for common tasks, access to librarian reference assistance, visibility into campus events, locations, dining, and transportation, access to financial information, personal information and account management, and housing listings. This is a portal delivering services to people so that they can easily access these services themselves.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison offers two demo accounts. Demoable functionality includes email preview and quota usage advisory, calendar preview (peeking into a proprietary enterprise calendar solution there adopted, views on campus news and events, personalized summaries of course resources, browsing of departmental timetables, an interactive course guide in the biological sciences, review of submitted technical support tickets, review of and data entry to campus lost-and-found, personalized professional development opportunities, integration with the enterprise web file sharing tool to expose links to bookmarked resources, summary quota information, and single sign on into the full file sharing on the web solution. The MyUW portal demo also showcases portlets affording listing of and quick information about advisees, browsing of DoIT invoices, requisition number generation, and access to benefits and earning statements.
Other schools have used uPortal as a portal for developing self-service functionality. For instance, the University of Colorado System has surfaced PeopleSoft functionality in uPortal.
What self-service functionality are you delivering via uPortal? I'd be thrilled to hear from you and help you to share your uPortal success stories.
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Andrew Petro
After graduating with a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University in 2004, Andrew stayed on to serve his alma mater as a casual systems programmer with the Technology & Planning group. His interests include automated software testing, application frameworks, and electronic security. Projects in which Andrew has been involved include the Central Authentication Service, YaleInfo Portal (Yale's uPortal implementation). and the JA-SIG uPortal project. Andrew serves as the release engineer for uPortal 2.6.x (previously for 2.5.x) and has been published in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery on the topic of electronic voting. In fall 2005, Andrew relocated to Wisconsin and continued to work for Yale on a contract basis while starting part time with Unicon and in spring 2006 Andrew joined Unicon full time, serving roles since then including technical lead on Academus and on Cooperative Support for uPortal.
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