MyUW: A Personal Portal to UW Services

Kathryn Sharpe and Kay Pilcher, Information Specialists, Computing & Communications

MyUW quietly appeared in the University of Washington Web world last spring. No public relations campaign heralded its arrival. Yet today over forty thousand people on campus are using it.

As a Web portal, or doorway, MyUW gives you access to specially tailored Web resources based on your roles at the university and your personal preferences. You select information from a menu provided and add your own bookmarks.

[Photo: Allison Cunningham in Mary Gates Hall.]

"MyUW is simple, convenient, and personal. I can select what I want to see and it's nice to be able to check my tuition account balance. MyUW is a step toward personalization at a big, sometimes overwhelming, university." —Allison Cunningham, sophomore, pre-major

A MyUW student "FrontPage" includes personal class schedule, financial balances, and selected links to advising, registration, campus activities, and more.

First MyUW Is for Students

This first version of MyUW provides information and personal services for UW students and recent alumni. (See screen shot at right.) If you are a student, you now can use MyUW to:

Check your grades
See your class schedule and a map of building locations
Access your UW email Inbox and folders with Web email
Review your account balances for tuition and housing & food services
Check your financial aid status
Make tuition payments from your bank account
See if the University Book Store has your textbooks
Change your address in the UW database

In the future, students and alumni will register for courses online and receive campus announcements keyed to their academic and extracurricular interests.

Custom Faculty and Staff Views Are Coming

A custom MyUW view for faculty and staff is not available yet, but is envisioned to include your teaching schedule and class list and integrated access to the Catalyst tools from a course page. You also will have easy access to an employee self-service package being developed by the USER project, and the authority to purchase supplies and services from an online catalog.

Although now only students can enjoy individually targeted content provided by a custom MyUW view, some faculty and staff have discovered MyUW and are regular users. For example, they use Web email, store bookmarks that become accessible from work and home, and personalize standard and campus Web resources to meet their needs.

If you would like to explore MyUW, see the quick instructions in the next article "Exploring MyUW."

[Web screen: The personalize MyUW Content page.]

Once you tell MyUW what you want to see on your screen, it delivers your personalized Web page.

Personalizing MyUW

MyUW differs from the UW home page because you can change, or personalize, MyUW to suit your needs. You can:

Select which services, events, reference tools, and news at the UW and beyond to view
Add and manage your bookmarks (such as easily change their order or group them by headings)

Based on your UW NetID, MyUW supplies you with options about information and services associated with your roles at the university. The screen capture at right, for example, shows some of the MyUW options you would have if you were registered this quarter as a student.

Because MyUW knows who you are, modifications you make can be remembered by the system. If you personalize the content of MyUW or change your viewing preferences (such as colors and background), these modifications are saved for the next time you open MyUW, even from a different computer or browser.

Your choices will increase as services not exclusively for students become available online. Coming in the near future on MyUW, for example, is a personal appointment calendar.

Multiple Roles: Students as Staff, Alumni as Sports Fans

The UW community is expansive and diverse. It includes students (current, prospective, extension, certificate program, graduate, and professional), parents, faculty, staff, alumni, Husky sports fans, prospective employees, patients, referring physicians, and others. Many people fall into more than one category—such as staff who also are alumni, parents, sports fans, and patients.

The MyUW vision is to recognize and build on these multiple, overlapping, and changing relationships and to provide a corresponding mix of services and information suited to each individual. In the Web portal world, this is why the UW is seen as a leader and why MyUW is regarded as a leading-edge service.

"I use MyUW all the time to check my class schedule and my Husky card balance so I know how much money I have for lunch or for printing in the lab." —Brian Green, senior, political science and art

The C&C staff creating MyUW (see article in this issue "A Team Creates MyUW") are designing MyUW to support your many roles. MyUW not only protects your personal information and provides you with the typical Web resources you desire, it also can enrich your association with the university by offering services that cover the full spectrum of UW activities—such as teaching, learning, research, library services, patient care, public service, entertainment, and the arts.

It is this melding of multiple roles that makes MyUW a powerful tool and a complex challenge to design. For a glimpse of the kinds of services MyUW might offer different audiences, you can see prototypes on the Web (at www.washington.edu/protos/myuw/demo/).

Development Continues

The MyUW portal supports Executive Vice President Weldon Ihrig's vision of a campus that provides integrated, transaction-oriented administrative and information services through the Web. (See article in this issue "Doing UW Business: Information When and Where You Need It.") Because it can provide you with the information you need to manage your relationship with the UW, it is seen as one step on the path to mass customization.

As MyUW continues to evolve, feedback from the UW community is essential. If you have comments or suggestions about the direction C&C is taking, as represented by the current content and appearance of MyUW as well as by the prototypes on the Web, send an email message to myuwhelp@cac.washington.edu Your active involvement is appreciated.

More Information About University Portals

Portal development in a university environment is a hot topic. MyUW is mentioned in two articles on portals in the July/August 2000 issue of EDUCAUSE Review:

"Institutional Information Portals" by Carl Jacobson (www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm00/articles004/horizons.pdf)
"Portals in Higher Education: What Are They, and What Is Their Potential?" by Michael Looney and Peter Lyman (www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm00/articles004/looney.pdf)

For more information about university portals, visit these two informative Web sites and their links:

"Questions & Brief Answers About Portals" by Howard Strauss (www.cren.net/know/techtalk/events/portals.html#questions)
"University Portals FAQ" from the University Web Developers' Mailing List (www.usask.ca/web_project/uwebd/portals_faq.html)

University of Washington Computing & Communications
Windows on Technology, No. 25, Autumn 2000
newsltr@cac.washington.edu