Add-ons and upgrades: Portal changes underway

New technology and applications are being added to the CMU Portal in order to provide students and faculty with better service.

The updates to the online course and financial management system include tools like blogs, wikis and surveys.

The changes are a work-in-progress and are meant to be an easy transition for the students and faculty, said Information Technology officials.

“It is our goal to make it very transparent for everyone,” said Director of Application Development John Rathje.

Over the next few months, the existing Portal will be transferred over to Microsoft Sharepoint 2007, an actual portal system itself.

Students that use the My Site feature on the Portal must transfer their existing My Site material over to my.cmich.edu by April 5.

Some may have already noticed changes in the past couple of weeks in the looks of the my.cmich.edu Web site.

Not only is that the Web site which students must transfer their data to, but it will act as a public gateway for Sharepoint users.

“While it functions almost identically to the previous login screen from an outside perspective, it is a necessary building-block to future single sign-on integrations,” said Help Desk Manager Jeff McDowell.

The new My Site will allow students and faculty to communicate in groups and use the site on a more individual basis, Rathje said.

As changes are continuously being made to the new My Site, the goal is to attain better organization and efficiency with the new technology.

“Sometimes you have to have a migration path to stay current,” Rathje said. “We will gain feedback from everyone and see what changes need to be made and to see what works.”

Faculty and staff at Central Michigan University will also have upgrades to their current team sites already existing on their portals.

The Sharepoint team sites are structured for more corporate use, Rathje said.

The upgrade to Sharepoint will not hurt the wallets of CMU either. Sharepoint has been included under Information Technology’s campus agreement.

“The only potential costs would be additional hardware,” McDowell said.

Rathje said that the overall use of the Portal is not expected to shift very much.

“A lot of it is what we can do in the future,” Rathje said.

university@cm-life.com