A division of Northwestern University Information Technology will release a new Web portal — similar to the student portal HereAndNow — the entire community as early next fall, NUIT Vice President Mort Rahimi said Wednesday.
The new portal will bring together NU services such as Blackboard, Webmail and CAESAR into a single interface, Rahimi said. To use the portal, users will only have to sign in once, instead of logging in separately for each service.
Tom Board, director of the newly formed Systems Information Architecture branch of NUIT that is overseeing the project, said he was unable to speculate how much the project will cost but pegged a broad estimate at “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Although HereAndNow already provides a portal for various services relevant to students, Rahimi said navigation between services and applications will be much easier within the new portal and access will not be just for students. HereAndNow, he said, is “just the beginning.”
“By using this new portal, we’re tying all these things together — e-mail, Blackboard, all that, onto a single page,” Rahimi said. “If you’re a student, it gives you everything that’s there.”
The portal will identify users after they log in and display information based on their roles within the university, he added.
For example, if a user’s roles include both student and employee of the university, he or she will be able to click on “student” or “employee” tabs that bring up windows with information relating to those roles. The student window, for example, might display course and registration information, while the employee window might display information relating to a user’s job at the university.
Board said the still-unnamed portal is in its earliest stages of development. The project’s design likely will change before its completion.
“It’s early on in its progress,” Board said. “There are a lot of things here that are ifs, ifs, ifs.”
Both Rahimi and Board said some of the biggest benefactors of the new Web portal will be university researchers, who have several roles within the university and often have large amounts of information to keep track of. The portal will allow researchers to access these forms of information at once, Board said.
“This will be beneficial to researchers, because researchers have lots of resources within and outside of the university,” he said. “Information such as financial information, events, grants — it’s important to have all that info together.”
