LDN - Luminis Developer Network

The single sign on was the killer app on my campus. We brought up Pipeline and "web for students" at the same time in 2000, so our campus never knew there was another way to get to Banner Self Service. But the semester we added the WebCT access through the portal... you could hear the sigh of relief across campus about not having another password to remember. We still have 2 logins -- Active Directory and Luminis (yeah, I know that can be done, not going there yet!) -- but that's manageable......

Now the sales pitch is the Announcements and Groups. We're backing into those -- more and more folk are using the Announcement Channel for internal announcements and we've made the portal the Intranet.

But, your boss is right. It needs a 'cheerleader.' I'm it on our campus, and since I've been the portal admin, that makes it easier to sell. But don't overwhelm them with *everything* the portal can do. Pick one or two very concrete things and sell those up front.

Other folk are doing cool things, I hope they tell you about it, or you can read about it here someplace, but it works well for us.

--Mary Jane

You are about to embark on an interesting journey, filled with many "wow"s, many endorsers and many naysayers.

First thing - if you are going to market your portal, you will make no headway with your executive or administrative staff if you focus on technical or quasi-technical benefits. If you push it by saying that "you can do this and this and this from one spot", their response will "but you can already do this" or "why would someone _want_ to do this?". No, you have to find something of a marketing and a visionary statement that will engage these people's interest.

In our school, the marketing/visionary statement is "myUCFV is the front door for the university community regardless of which campus they attend". It doesn't sound like much, but with a multi-campus institution that sometimes suffers the arguments "campus A gets everything, and campus B is ignored", a common, consistent, and equal front door for everyone is appealing to the powers-that-be.

And, remember, without support at the highest levels of your institution, you will have great difficulties in making things happen.

So, what's in it for students? That has to be a different argument. We did push the single signon arguments for them, as well as availability anytime from anywhere. Even so, this has been a tough sell - student's don't care about campus announcement, institutional email, or many other things in the portal. The best thing we've done here is catch the 'new student introduction' sessions in the late summer and do a 60 minute presentation to the incoming crowd. If you catch them early, and tell them that this is the tool to use, the newbies will use it. And continue to use it. And, in 4 years, you've got them all converted. We've seen a steady increase in our daily logins, with significant sustained increases every term.

But you still have to have something in there for the students to get them in there - so, aside from making the portal the prime method to access Banner Student Self Service and Student email, we've added tabs and channels that, I hope, capture the non-instructional side of student life. We have over 100 RSS channels installed - everything from music reviews and movie reviews to concert and movie listings to sports news to recipie channels to job listings. Anything that may provide added value for the student.

Couple this with a big push to students that the institution will ONLY communicate to them with the student email address, (and not hotmail, gmail, or anything else), and automatic notification that instructors have entered grades and they are now viewable - people are starting to use the system more and more.

Faculty - I have to say that I've depended upon the students to drag the faculty into the portal world. Some faculty have jumped in and are using the features in a big way, some have not. Some don't want to move from WebCT. Sometimes it works, sometimes, I have to bribe. Sometimes not.

Staff - got to say that there's really nothing in the portal for them aside from recently getting Banner Web for Employees running. In the near future we will stop printing pay advice slips, and then we'll get more staff into the portal. Hopefully I will have more stuff appealing to staff at that time, but time will tell.

Features that help...
1) if you're not running Luminis IV, get the 'changes in groups/courses' channel from William at UofManitoba (also, elsewhere in lumdev). getting people to do a hunt and seek for stuff added to their courses is a BIG turnoff.

2) get the classified advertisement from UofSaskatchewan. Another value added feature that promises to bring people in

3) if you have access to the student ID card photo database, make a report in Faculty Web that will display a class list WITH PHOTOS, and distribute that ONLY thru the portal. Eventhough faculty can access Faculty Web from a direct link, force EVERYONE to go thru the portal, and offer this as the carrot. Sometimes you have to not play fair to get things happenning.

4) spend a lot of time making sure your email table (GOREMAL) is consistent with the email assignments in the portal's LDAP. If you get that working correctly, then you have a big bonus for administrators (in Reg Office especially), and Faculty that students will get email (as long as student use the institutional email system). If you can, get the library to use the student email addresses too. And, (big bonus), if you can, get the powers-that-be to make a policy that ALL institutional communication will go thru the institutional email addresses only. Drag them in any way you can.

Man, I could go on for hours... but I'll stop here. If you have more questions, give me a shout.

Good luck

--- Michael
michael.bayrock@ucfv.ca