Student Portals

U Northwestern Ohio Overhauls Portal

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 06/02/10

The University of Northwestern Ohio is retooling its Web site to provide more online services for its students, faculty, and administrators.

A new portal, planned for a July 1 launch, will provide single sign-on to e-mail, financial aid information, and academic records. It will also provide access to campus announcements, news, and events; let the user search all university Web sites at once, and provide links to campus departments and online services.

The university, which has about 4,000 students, is launching MyUNOH using Datatel's Portal and Microsoft SharePoint. The new site is intended to integrate with the institution's Datatel Colleague enterprise resource planning software.

The integration with other institutional applications will allow the university to segment and tailor messages to students instead of broadcasting them to the entire student body, the current practice.

"From the beginning of the portal project, students were our main focus," said Jeremy Brinkman, director of administrative systems. "They told us that they receive so many irrelevant e-mails that they often overlook important messages. Our students are also gathering critical information by logging into numerous applications, all over the campus network. MyUNOH will quickly eliminate this and save them an immense amount of time and trouble."

In a follow-up phase post-launch, the university will add secure access for staff and faculty to portal sections and implement Datatel Mobile Access to deliver information to Smart phones. "Mobile access is here, expected by the students and faculty, and a trend you just can't ignore," said Brinkman.