The University of Idaho’s Internet portal, my.uidaho.edu is being retired Oct. 5 in an effort to improve functionality and transition to new technology.
“Basically it’s going away because we’ve recently gone through a strategic planning process in ITS,” said Brian Borchers, Assistant Director for Management Information Systems for ITS. “… One of the things that came out of that research process was a desire to do other kinds of technologies that are hopefully more advantageous and valuable to the university, one of which was mobile technologies.”
The my.uidaho portal requires a number of resources in order to keep the site up and running. Borchers said ITS would like to put those resources into things that students and faculty are excited about.
“When it was originally conceived there were a lot of plans to do a lot of really useful, really interesting things with it,” Borchers said. “The problem is that it takes a lot of resources to manage. It’s a very labor-intensive tool to manage. There’s a lot of work involved in keeping it refreshed, and
for the amount of value that we get from it versus the amount of energy that we expend on it — the ratio is not very good.”
A portal is similar to a web index, Borchers said. The portal compiles links to useful university resources such as web-time entry for employees and class registration for students and redirects users to the original sites.
“What’s there right now…most of it exists in VandalWeb,” Borchers said. “My.uidaho is really nothing more than a window to VandalWeb. It’s just a way to put everything in one nice, concise place. A portal is really kind of an old technology…it was really big in the ‘90s,” Borchers said.
Borchers said the goal is to increase functionality because UI has never really had that before.
Borchers said VandalWeb and the development of a university mobile app will offer all of the functions that are currently available through the my.uidaho portal.
“We’re going to be moving forward to actually roll out our initial University of Idaho mobile presence,” Borchers said. “Where would we rather invest those resources? We would rather put them in mobile technology than have them in something people aren’t that interested in.”
Borchers said this is part of recent strategic planning that will help the university move forward and become more accessible to users.
“The university is actually quite behind on that sort of thing. If you go to most universities, they have a mobile presence and we want to make sure that we’re getting something out there,” Borchers said. “Once we get the ball rolling we need to go out and have some conversations with the community and figure out what people need. We’re not just building this for our own benefit. We’re building it for the user.”
The portal will officially be retired on the evening of Oct. 5 because, although Borchers said the process to turn off the portal is simple, ITS hopes to make the transition seamlessly.
“We could turn the portal off in five minutes if we didn’t care about disrupting people and all of that functionality would exist somewhere else but the goal here is to make this as smooth a transition as possible,” Borchers said. “There’s really no functionality going away, we’re just taking people back to where they were getting it anyway.”
Kaitlyn Krasselt can be reached at [email protected]