Background
A decade ago there was some understanding what a portal was. "All" content should be in. Some tried to put actual content in while others put links. There was a sense that customization was important, but anecdotal evidence the actual use of customization has been less than anticipated.
...
The big gain for the portal at some campuses was single sign on.
Campus visioning
started out as One campus started a visioning process with 7 members then ballooned to a large team trying to develop vision of communication on campus. The portal team looked at the priorities being single sign on and one stop shop.
...
UofI is developing tools that help delegate portal administration. They also developed an API that allows customers to write apps that will integrate well with the portal. Both of these seem to be custom types of content management systems.
People are expecting that parents and other groups now have access to information. Some of this extends to having a personalized experience. If you want to draw people in, you have to create additional value.
The portal is a dashboard, but people think of the the collection of everything as a the portal if it has the same look-n-feel. Hard to distinguish the difference between the portal and intranet. This can be extended to include the public site as well. Your banks web site is public, but you can log in and then have it be personalized. What distinguishes the portal from everything else?
Everything became a portal. When you use the term, you had tot clarify it. It was used as a marketing tool. There never was a common understanding of what a portal meant. In general, most of us do not use the term 'portal' when we market our service to the end use. Users may not actually understand that there is a portal behind it. Other students see their learning management tool as a portal.
How do we get further involvement from service providers to add content into the portal and increase its value? This requires lowering the barriers to entry.
Branding and marketing is important. There are many different applications with portal-like characteristics. A central, campus portal can help reduce the confusion. It can help discourage other portals from popping up. UofI is looking at having their central portal have a departmental feel when you log in. It would recognize you and show the right department. It allows the departments to express their own brand. It is difficult to actually get them to create content. Start out small, let the complexity and right content come later. The portal should pull things together instead of eliminating other portals/sites/apps.
The portal is a place you can hide the complexity/dysfunction of the campus structure.
An agora. An open place of assembly.
One key is whether or not the portal is actually useful.
The user should have the ability to customize their preferences. What groups or types of content they see. Ability to block content. There is an institutional need to push out certain content. Sometimes it seems that our community is trying to make it easy to exclude content. It seems our communities are sometimes focused on excluding content instead of sharing and finding content. IT and higher ed communities seem unusual in their needs. If it is too easy to create and share content, the level of noise increases and the valuable content is lost.