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Campus Portals: Future Hope, Past History, or More Hype?
6/27/2002
Campus portals have the potential to connect an institution’s constituents, both on campus and external, to appropriate campus resources through a highly personalized interface. But how close are colleges and universities to taking real advantage of portal technologies? Here, David Eisler provides an update on the progress and challenges of portals in higher education.
Just as the white-hot boom of the dot.com economy has been replaced by a more circumspect approach to e-commerce, so has the campus portal market retrenched, with revised business plans, the demise of some early providers, and the continued consolidation of others. In this more cautious time, what is the value and future for campus portals? Given the economic constraints placed upon higher education and the developing concerns regarding tuition increases, should campuses continue to create, develop, and implement portals? If so, what are reasoned approaches to portals, and how do campuses make informed decisions about the true value of these efforts?
The State of the Art
Portal projects still come primarily in three flavors: self-developed, JA SIG’s open source collaborative effort, and vendor solutions. Common characteristics of portals include single sign-on and authorization capability, personalized information provided in a secure environment, access to channels of information from external sources, and the ability for users to customize the portal in terms of content and appearance.
Self-developed portals require significant technical expertise on campus and the commitment of resources. Nevertheless, some of the best-operating campus portals have been created by campus efforts. There are some excellent examples that allow guest access (see box, page 16).
The Java Special Interest Group (JA SIG) continues to grow and expand with operating campus portals in the United States, Canada, and Europe. For reasons that are not entirely clear, some lead institutions for this project have only implemented demonstration versions of this portal. SNAP (Simple Navigational Access Portal), from the University of California Irvine provides a good example of the working features from the latest JA SIG portal. While the computer code for this portal is available without cost, JA SIG portals require substantial campus technical expertise.
An area of continued success for portal vendors is among those institutions that have partnered with administrative software companies. Campus Pipeline has moved from the advertising-generated model, repositioned itself as a middleware vendor, and continues to benefit from its partnership with SCT and the Banner software platform. Jenzabar has purchased a number of administrative software companies including Campus America, CMDS, CARS, and Quodata. Campus Cruiser has partnered with Datatel. Other companies have worked to develop portals to complement their software. PeopleSoft created a portal designed to interface with its administrative software. Blackboard has developed a portal to complement its course management system.
Most of the startups that proposed creating portals at little or no cost are gone.
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