The NUPortal to Improve Navigating at Northwestern
March 2007
All of your favorite University services will soon be available with just one click of your mouse when you use the new Web business portal, called The NUPortal, from NUIT.
Available this summer, this secure, user-friendly site will supplement the University home page by providing personalized, easy access to role-based NetID services.
“The NUPortal is the result of more than two years of strategic planning. The purpose is to integrate University Web-based systems essential to academic, research, and administrative work at Northwestern, into a personalized, single point of access,” said Betty Brugger, Director of NUIT Management Systems. “It is designed to help faculty, staff, and students use University services more effectively and work more efficiently.”
Everything you need — all in one place
If you already use a public Web portal, such as Google or MyYahoo, you will find The NUPortal familiar and easy to use. Similar to these services, The NUPortal will be customizable, tailored to your own interests and roles at the University.
The NUPortal provides areas with available applications specific to your role, such as “faculty”, “staff”, “student”, or “researcher”. Users will also have a personal area for the applications used most often.
These areas will be pre-populated with relevant portlets of information and applications. Services planned for the launch include Plan-it-Purple, Depot, Library Search and News, as well as an Emergency News Feed for breaking campus news. Initially, portlets and services will be limited, but will continue to expand to include more and more services.
How it all began
NUIT's ServicePoint project team began collaborative planning, project management, and early development on The NUPortal in 2006. To assess the needs of the community and gather feedback, the team made numerous presentations to University groups around campus. The Office of Web Communications was engaged to design the user interface and and help conduct usability studies with faculty, staff, and students. Combined with additional research and community feedback, specific requirements for The NUPortal were identified and a launch date is set for July 2007.
The ServicePoint team continues to work with online service providers from across the University. Plans are being developed to include services from Caesar (Student Enterprise System), the Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS), WebMail, and the Course Management System in the next year.
“Deploying the business portal and integrating it with our existing enterprise systems is a challenging, but exciting task,” said Harry Samuels, project manager for the portal. “The NUPortal will provide a framework that helps the University manage and deliver their most highly-accessed online services.”
Look for more information on the launch of The NUPortal in the coming weeks.
