Yale Student Government: Pro Portal

This just in: The Yale College Council (student government) pushes for more online services at Yale to be integrated into a portal.

We’ve heard a lot of student concern about everything ITS-related being very fragmented.

Yale has a portal, one I had the pleasure to work on for a bit, but I think the students have nailed it on the head: in order to be compelling and more valuable, more services need to be integrated into the portal (e.g., bill payment) ala Rutgers and the portal needs more dashboard characteristics (synoptic calendar views and change indicators).

Somewhat interestingly, the Yale College Council appears to be running its own portal, which is not necessarily a bad thing. There's a tension worth exploring between what should be centrally provided by a University with 300 years of tradition and what should be provided by students in between their course readings.

It used to be that I would argue that you only need one portal, that once you have two or more horizontal portals, you're signing up for extra pain for no added benefit, fragmenting services and investment across sites. (I would then argue that uPortal should be your one horizontal portal platform). With the rise of SOA-esque drop-into-abribtrary-site JavaScript widgets and RSS, I wonder if this is less true, if many services can be factored such that they are usable in an official university portal, in an ad-hoc student-run portal, and even in more global horizontal portals such as Google's and Yahoo's. Many focused web applications exposing interesting feeds and widgets, federated under a powerful single sign on framework, and integrated into a compelling portal.

One more reason for us all to wish we were college students again, as if one were needed.