Building the Student Portal at Nottingham
updated: Nov 2002
| Introduction | E-Learning | Structured Data Services | The University Website |
| School Intranets | The changing web | A virtuous circle | Living in harmony with existing services |
Many excellent websites that support students within the University have been put together by an individual with a vision. That individual will have collated content, designed an interface, thought up a title to brand the service, and a rationale for presenting that kind of information in an appropriate manner, and they may feel a certain defensiveness about a University led initiative that might seem to be encroaching on their territory.
Compass needs to define its relationship with those services, and establish trusted boundaries. Compass has a legitimate interest in providing ‘latest information’ and ‘current status’, but does not wish to become overloaded with functionality, or static pages of information, that properly reside within the established services.
The minimal relationship would be a descriptive link to the other service. A better model would be one where the service agreed to expose its dynamic content (headlines, what’s new, your current status etc.) to the portal, to be published as a clickable link that would take the student to the relevant part of the service. This may be done within the frameset of the portal or as a new window, by negotiation. Where an existing service has no strong reasons to maintain its own presentation layer, there should be a review of whether it is more appropriate to offer that service entirely through the portal, and a number of technical strategies exist to achieve that end.
http://www.eis.nottingham.ac.uk/compass/
eis
