Bringing the Portal to Life
- Kevin Maurer – Info Systems Manager, Hillsdale College – kmaurer@hillsdale.edu
- Jeremy Brinkman – Asst. VP of IT & Dir of Admin Systems – University of Northwestern Ohio – jbrinkman@unoh.edu
- We have WebAdvisor – why do we need the Portal is a question people frequently ask
- Hillsdale –
- Live on Portal December 2008
- UNOH
- Live on Portal in July 2010
- teaches high performance automotives – have their own race track
- Preparing Users
- Hillsdale:
- Met with faculty chairs & core team
- opened the portal up before "Go Live"
- Postcards passed out at registration
- UNOH
- Northwestern Communicator (newsletter for fac/staff)
- Demo sessions with managers – walking people through the steps made a difference – "this isn’t something IT is pushing onto us!" – can really help if you go to the right departments with the right people who are willing to adopt and USE the system –
- Pre-release posters & other promotions: "This is what the portal is going to do for YOU" poster –
- Facebook, Twitter, etc. – grabbing the biggest demographic we could find to promote to them –
- If you don’t have buy in from the people who make the decisions then it is hard to get the job done – The CORE Team because the Governance Team
- Hillsdale:
- Governance
- A strong governance structure will set you up for success
- Assign & document ownership of content early
- some departments have tech-savvy users: let them help you!
- a standing team is a great start. The Core Team was used at UNOH and Hillsdale
- Easy Wins which are easy to promote to your end users
- SSO to email, WebAdvisor & UI are attention grabbers
- configure search for all your websites, not only the Portal
- Convert "All Campus" messages to portal announcements or events (less e-mail = Good)
- Other examples:
- Employee Newsletter Archive – so people don’t have to keep the PDF in their email
- Job List in Career Services
- Campus RSS Feeds
- Content Contributor Panel – there are so many places on the portal that people needed to put information but there needed to be a central place – in Share Point there is a list of where they can Place information (they can’t do it without permission but they know where locations are)
- Buy / sell / trade (other exchange public folders)
- Comments
- cuts down on a lot of the campus emails but people are still occasionally sending blanket email .. "oh well"
- Get sick of getting tons of emails on the same subject (like 10 emails about the blood drive)
- Training
- Help your Datatel Success Partner to scale down your training to fit your school
- Content contributors
- Faculty & staff – do video tutorials
- Students – do video tutorials & email quick tips
- Usabilty Testing
- Recruit some student volunteers – bribed them with meal tickets to get them to come in
- Create a list of tasks for the students to perform
- Provide time for candid feedback
- Identify common navigation challenges
- Offer free stuff as an incentive – like Meal coupons & giveaways
- Grant volunteers early access to the Portal and follow-up with them – they were able to actively USE the portal as an early adopter
- Comments
- VERY important to the process
- demos:
- my.hilsdale.edu
- Hillsdale does not have a PORTAL entrance – you just click on "fac/staff" or "student" – uses an ISIS Server – the more we can simplify is easier – recognizes that he is a Staff member and puts him into the Staff portal (staff site not super snazzy – pretty much looks like the out-of-the-box Datatel portal) – The calendar is pulled out of Exchange – going through an implementation of Razors Edge and are using shared document space with the team – super cool where they can look at who is in a course section including the picture & profile of the student… this is for faculty! – WebAdvisor INSIDE the portal is much nicer looking
- my.unoh.edu
- Is not using the ISIS Server so not as "pretty" or user friendly – (Their page is equally not to Jazzy – 3-columns is nice but pretty much out-of-the-box) – they have two constituencies: Fac/staff & students – they use "zones": Email on left / center is announcements, campus news (external RSS feed), campus event, Athletics feed / Right (tabs): WebAdvisor (can do multiple processes at one time within the portal), UI 4.2, Business Objects – If we want to promote something heavily it can be front & center – if you bring people who like technology and want to use technology… they will blossom.
- my.hilsdale.edu
- Portal Annoyances
- All day calendar events appear to begin at 12am
- No ISA Server = Windows login box
- No error page for failed authentication in Windows 2008/IIS7
- Non-user friendly error when SSO credentials are not set. The user believes their is an error – this cause a lot of tech requests
- Keeping the Momentum
- Gradually retire old interfaces – phasing out WebAdvisor, etc.
- Activate portal content and promote it as a new service – make it clear how much more helpful this will be
- My sites
- Audience Targeting
- InfoPath & Workflow
- Direct legacy WebAdvisor users to the portal via welcome message
- Develop a content contributor panel to easily manage information
- Questions
- How long did it take?
- if you have experience with SharePoint you can get it done quick
- Did you use professional services?
- Who was part of the implementation team?
- Decision makers
- Users across campus – IT people – early adopters
- How long did it take?