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The Centennial Student Union isn't the only thing changing about Minnesota State. Features on the MSU home page Web site have the addition of the "myMSU" portal.
Early in the semester, the Information and Technology Services officially launched myMSU Web portal, which can be used by students, faculty and staff. MyMSU has features including MavMAIL, MavDISK, national, local and weather news and added links. To log on, visit http://portal.mnsu.edu.
According to Ted Johnson, ITS Web developer, the portal idea was lurking in ITS for two years when the Minnesota State Student Association approached ITS with interest. After a survey, the project began taking shape last spring.
"The strength of the portal is the ability for assigning the rights of ownership and authorship," Johnson said. "Our ideas are still ahead to what we've developed. This project will never be finished as we will keep changing and adding."
Developed with Microsoft ASP.net Technology, the Web portal allows "personalization" by letting users hide or display certain windows of interest.
"Commercial Web sites like MyExcite and MyYahoo have hundreds of selections," Johnson said. "We're only on baby steps of personalization and we have a lot of work to do to make it like the way we want."
MyMSUis still undergoing changes by adding features such as mavquest, dictionary and the College of Business module will be added in the coming weeks.
The feedback section allows users to send their problems or suggestions. Another exciting feature is that users can receive updates from different departments. The departments can add any articles or updates on the page's current content.
Image Bank is a feature that will let users browse through hundreds of images stored in a gallery and save them in preferred format (JPG, PDF, GIF) and will be available within the next month. Image Bank will thus be handy for any presentation or Web site development. Desire2Learn, the new instructional management system, is also a coming attraction.
Though many features of myMSU are similar to the current MSU Web site, the main difference is that the MSU Web site is an external web site, requiring users to log in each time to get information and use other functions (MavDISK, MavMAIL, registration, paying bills), but the MSU portal aims to bring all the functionalities online on one site with a single sign-on.
"There are a number of different applications on different servers and we're trying to bring all of these together to make it user friendly" Johnson said.
For more details on the Web development project, visit http://www.mnsu.edu/its/web/portal .
Irina Kansakar is a Reporter staff writer
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