Creating Campus Portals, Part III - Working with a Vendor

For many campuses the appropriate strategy may be to work with a vendor who specializes in campus web portals.  These products provide different levels of personalization and customization and may include advertising.  The use of advertising - a sensitive subject on some campuses - will greatly reduce or in some instances eliminate costs to the university.  In other cases it may be necessary for university data to reside on vendor servers, raising potential questions about who owns these data.

There are several critical elements in choosing a campus portal vendor.  The first involves the ability of the vendor to connect with and interact with existing university data.  Without this capability the campus will not gain this important feature of campus portals.  However, connecting to university data is a complex task requiring in some cases significant programming, and may raise security issues.  As a result most vendor portals providing data interaction connect or partner with a particular brand of administrative software.  

The next critical element involves the sometime transient nature of the dot.com  world.  It is important to choose a vendor that can provide and maintain the portal and still be in business for the conceivable future.  

The following page, http://weber.edu/portals/buy_from_a_vendor.htm links to four full-function campus web portal vendors and three vendors who provide campus portals for portions of the campus, things like alumni and athletics.  We also recommend an article, "Institutional Information Portals by Carl Jacobsen, which  nicely sums up much of what we've examined to this point.

With this lesson we have concluded  a five-part introduction to campus web portals.  Later in this project we'll return to campus examples from AASCU institutions using some of these vendors.  If your campus has worked with a vendor, I would love to hear from you regarding your experiences, even if you decided not to implement at this time.  

Next we will move to readiness factors a campus should consider when
beginning a portal project and thoughts on the collaborative nature of campus portals.  As always your feedback and thoughts are sincerely appreciated.

dave

PS. On Wednesday, Oct. 18th, Steve Gilbert and I will be participating in an eColloquia webcast on portals.  The eColloquia is being hosted by HorizonLive and WebCT.  If you or some members of your campus community are interested in participating in this event, you can register at the following url -http://www.webct.com/ecolloquia/viewpage?name=ecolloquia_event_5
The eColloquia is free but advanced registration is needed.  To register you will need to provide your name and email address.  You will not receive any unsolicited e-mail as a result of this registration.  The webcast is scheduled for 2 pm eastern time, but will be archived and available after the live feed.