This university launched a new mobile- and tablet-friendly cloud-based website Thursday that aggregates more than 130 campus services on one website.
The site, one.umd.edu, replaced the MyUMD portal, formerly under the URL my.umd.edu, which the university phased out because of its outdated software, said Phyllis Johnson, the communications and marketing director for the Division of Information Technology.
“It’s a new platform that we’re using so that we can gather a whole bunch of campus services all in one location,” Johnson said. “It’s basically for easy access, one-stop shopping.”
The new site improves and expands on the applications previously available through the MyUMD portal, including links to services such as class schedules, a campus map and student accounts, she said.
These services are organized in blocks, which were designed for easy use on tablets and mobile devices. Students can also rate and provide feedback on different services, Johnson said, and they can customize the way blocks are ordered on the page.
The university put the site through a soft launch in January. The server redirected requests for my.umd.edu to the new site, so students could see the site and provide feedback before it officially launched and after DIT tweaked visuals and site performance, Johnson said.
The first year cost for the service was $20,790, according to DIT officials.
DIT developed the site using software purchased from rSmart. The company, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, runs a higher-education platform called OneCampus through a partnership with Indiana University, said Tiffani Nichols, rSmart marketing director and a 1999 university alumna.
The software for OneCampus — not to be confused with OneClass, a study service responsible for recent spam messages on ELMS — is used by eight schools across the country, including the University of Delaware and Purdue University.
This university was first to test the technology, Nichols said.
“When the university purchases the software, they can make it their own,” she said. “The look and feel changes, but the functionality is the same for all universities.”
OneCampus uses cloud technology so the software is not running directly on university servers, which ensures it is always available and easy to update, Nichols said.
OneCampus development was facilitated by Internet2, a nonprofit organization made up of universities and higher-education institutions. Within Internet2, a program called the NET+ initiative consists of universities working together to develop cloud services, NET+ Programming Director Andrew Keating wrote in an email.
These programs, including the cloud-storage network Box, are tested and approved by the universities within NET+ before being put to use, he wrote.
“Overall, you’re seeing the benefits of the higher education community working together to develop and deploy cloud services at scale,” Keating wrote, “and hopefully the new portal will be a great addition to the IT service landscape at UMD.”
Johnson said university officials wanted this site to use a new technology and design that takes advantage of how many people already use online services.
“We’re hoping that, No. 1, it’s convenient. We’re hoping it simplifies access to different services available on campus,” she said, noting that more services could become available over time. “It also should provide a certain amount of familiarity because it replicates the communication capabilities that people are used to now anyway online.”
