Tell Us How a Portal Would Work for You

With all of the great input we’ve gotten from our meetings about communicating at Albany Law, we want to be sure we don’t leave anyone out of the process. So we are taking  this opportunity to open the floor to any thoughts or ideas you have on how you can see a portal being an effective tool for communication here at ALS.

By answering the following questions you can help us get a more complete image of how the ALS community as a whole uses technology to interact with each other.

• What tools and processes do you use for communication both in and out of the classroom?
• With whom do you regularly communicate using these tools?
• From where do you use these tools?
• What calendars do you use to keep track of law school events, and to manage your own schedule?
• If you’ve used a portal in another academic setting, what were your likes and dislikes?
• How do you utilize the external website for communication?
• What questions do you have for ITS about the Web Portal Project?

As always, we encourage you to leave a comment, or email me (Sam) at ssull@albanylaw.edu.

Announcing the Web Portal Project

ITS is thrilled to announce the Web Portal Project.

A direct result of the Technology Strategy Project, the goal of the Web Portal Project is to enhance the efficiency of communication with targeted user groups, simplify access to personal productivity tools, deliver vital institutional information and calendars, improve access to key business performance indicators and streamline web content management processes to decrease opportunities for creating redundant data.

These goals will be met with the implementation of an institution-wide portal. This portal will give students, faculty and staff access to many of the most important tools you use to communicate at Albany Law through one point of access. That means one username and password to access a bulk of the applications you use at Albany Law on a daily basis.

The first phase in the Web Portal Project began in January with requirement elicitation. This phase includes extensive discussions with a diverse representation of the Albany Law community to help identify and confirm current processes for communication and productivity. We’ve also been seeking additional insights into how these processes can be improved upon.

Some of the more prevalent topics raised in these discussions have been:

• increased access to resources via handheld devices
• a more centralized events calendar
• a reduction in the number of emails with duplicate info
• web-based access to productivity tools
• a more centralized events calendar
• web-based access to network drives
• improved document collaboration tools
• did we mention a more centralized event calendar?

…and many more features we are actively investigating.

The next milestones in the Web Portal Project are as follows:

• March 2010 – Complete requirements elicitation
• May 2010 – Define project scope
• July 2010 – Implementation kick-off

We encourage you to add our blog to your favorites, or subscribing to our RSS feed to keep up-to-date on the progress of this project. You can also follow us on Twitter @AlbanyLawITS