Introducing the MyNaz Portal

By now, most of the Nazareth College community has heard that soon we will be adopting a portal. Maybe you know that the portal is called MyNaz.  But what is a portal? What are the advantages of a portal? The purpose of a portal is to keep community members connected with what is happening at the college and to provide customized access to the tools that you need. Customization allows you to define your own unique and personal view of the information available on the MyNaz portal.

First and foremost, a portal is a web application. Secondly, it knows who you are. Finally, you can customize your view. Most campus web sites, including ours, offer the viewer a choice. For example, from the naz.edu home page, you can follow the link for PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS or for FACULTY AND STAFF. From the FACULTY AND STAFF page, you can choose NazNet, BlackBoard, or Zimbra, etc. You have to seek the information. A portal reverses this model. Once you log in to the portal, it recognizes that you are faculty or staff or student, etc, and organizes the information and applications that you might need. Service and information are delivered to you through one point of entry. The services are relevant to you and based on your own preferences, thereby lessening extraneous information.

This is done in two ways. You have access to certain information and applications because of your role at the college. In addition, you can customize your view. For example, a faculty member might get e-mails and announcements pertaining only to faculty, as well as access to BlackBoard, Zimbra, NazNet and others. Then, the faculty member can choose to get notifications regarding some events on campus and not others.

Individual, personalized information will continue to be sent and received via e-mail. Community-wide or interest-specific information will be communicated via the portal, MyNaz, in the form of notification, announcements, and channels. You will have more control to choose the information that interests you and decline that which does not.

MyNaz is an implementation of uPortal. UPortal, the 2007 winner of the EDUCAUSE Catalyst Award, is the leading open source enterprise portal framework built by and for the higher education community. UPortal was actually developed by a consortium of colleges and universities who were looking specifically to develop a framework for assembling college content and service “channels”. As of August 2006, uPortal was in production at more than 800 colleges and universities around the world. As of September 2007, 91% of all schools surveyed by EDUCAUSE have implemented a portal or have such an implementation in process or planned. Nazareth’s implementation is well under way.

The Portal Steering Committee (PSC) has been busy designing and overseeing the development of the Nazareth College portal. A prototype of the MyNaz portal will be available in Spring ’08. A first step in this implementation was the move to our new e-mail system, Zimbra. At this point, all faculty and staff are using Zimbra. In the coming months, the PSC will start offering new opportunities for you to participate in the process and to provide your input. These will include demos, Q & A, and training sessions. We will let you know the details as they are worked out. Keep checking mynaz.naz.edu for more information. Please use the “feedback” form found there to send us your questions & ideas.