Since our last post, the Portal Advisory Team has made significant progress towards the upcoming soft-launch of the Albany Law Campus Portal.
Branding
'myAlbanyLaw' campus portal branding sample.
In November and December of 2010, the Communications department worked closely with Datatel to customize the branding of the Albany Law Campus Portal. Focus was placed on making sure that the look and feel of the portal fell within Albany Law’s established style guidelines. Communications recognizes that the campus portal will be a tool used throughout the day by the Albany Law community, and was sure to customize to allow for greatest ease of use. Particular consideration was given to the following design aspects:
- developing a color scheme
- webpart customization
- customizing headers and footers
Communications was also tasked with naming the Albany Law Campus Portal, now named myAlbanyLaw.
Technical Implementation
ITS has completed the technical implementation of Datatel ActiveCampus Portal solution in our environment. We’ve successfully integrated the portal solution with existing Webadvisor and Colleague environments, ensuring single sign-on access to some of the most commonly accessed academic and business processes at Albany Law.
Governance and Taxonomy Design
With the completion of Technical Implementation and Branding, the next phase of the implementation began in January. Governance and Taxonomy design and building are a vital part of a successful campus portal. Building a proper Taxonomy, along with policies and procedures to back it up will help ensure full adoption of a campus-wide portal solution. The Portal Advisory Team, a well-balanced representation of all areas of the law school community, is now working to develop these policies and guidelines, and decides how the governance team will function on an ongoing basis. The team guides the development and configuration of the portal, makes decisions on how access and content will be managed. The Advisory Team will exploit their breadth of Albany Law experience to develop thorough governance policies.
The screenshot looks quite promising. I hope that the final product is integrated enough to encourage daily use, i.e., SBA event calendar, professors posting class updates, student groups reaching their members, etc.