Rutgers University

Our goal is to provide one-stop shopping, give users a central point to access institutional services. We provide some general useage tools like newsfeeds, PIM (Email, Todo), and weather information, but not to the breadth of Google, or Yahoo!, and mostly when value can be delivered from customizing the tool to fit Rutgers users (e.g. Rutgers Weather Reports). Building on uPortal enabled easy integration with existing authentication, user stores, and allowed us to concentrate on features & availability work without having to build an entire platform to deliver services.

When students visit the site they are presented with a static launch page which shows system announcements & links directly into various features of the portal. Clicking on Login redirects them to CAS, after signing in, they are redirected to the portal.

After logging in, students have a relatively simple layout that initially consists of five tabs: "Everyday", "Academics", "Libraries", "Campus Life" and "myTab." Other services are offered in addition to the default content, but a majority (~65% of our users) have not customized their layout. Everyday gives them access to email (modified UBC_Webmail), Personal profile, Featured events, and other content. Additionally, a shortcut bar at the top of the page provides access to frequently accessed content like email, directory, feedback, etc. Email is our most highly used feature, in addition to peak usages at semester end for checking of grades & transcripts.

Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive with hundreds of students taking the opportunity to submit feedback messages through the included "Feedback" channel.

myRutgers is accessible to anyone with a valid Rutgers NetID, however the development effort is currently geared towards students. Faculty/Staff can (and increasingly do) take advantage of Email, Profile lookup and other features. A pilot was concluded in Summer of 2005 and we are currently evaluating a strategy for Faculty & Staff Users.

We have made some modifications to the base uPortal framework:

• modified the portal framework to eliminate guest users/sessions

• reworked the username attribute to key users based on an opaque # (RCPID) instead of username - allowing usernames to change without forcing data migration

• modified webproxy channel & content to be "location aware" - change displayed content based on a user's primary campus location (Camden, Newark, New Brunswick/Piscataway)

• incorporated an alerts service allowing individual alert notices to be delivered to user via several mediums (portal, email)

• replaced the default theme with an XHTML/CSS based one (currently in uPortal HEAD)

• added a single RU_USER_CHANNEL_CONF table to hold user channel preferences (key value pairs keyed on userID & instanceID)

• a commandline SLM layout publishing tool that takes an XML document to produce user layouts.

• JSP pages to peek into the DB and see channel subscriptions, user logins, other stats