On Monday, May 22, 2006, the University of Maryland awarded Exceptional Software Strategies Inc. of Linthicum, Maryland (www.exceptionalsoftware.com) the contract for the highly anticipated UM Campus Portal system. The portal will be used by all campus constituents as a single access point for a host of applications and personalized information, all housed in a consistent, intuitive, seamless, and secure environment.

The new contract includes the following benefits: purchase of the industry leading BEA Aqualogic User Interaction Portal, software maintenance for an 11-year period, technical training and content management training, installation and configuration, and production of a proof-of-concept/demo portal built side-by-side with university programmers as a practical mentoring exercise in portal development.

Both the campus Portal Committee (a subcommittee of the IT Council) and the OIT technical team have made substantial progress since the purchase:

• The OIT technical team has completed portal administrator training.
• The portal is up and running in the Development and Quality Assurance/Staging environments.
• Twelve developers from OIT, Student Affairs, Engineering, and the Office of the Registrar completed a three-day training course on portal development.
• The aforementioned developers collaborated with Exceptional Software Strategies Inc. on the proof-of-concept and demo portal, which was completed in early August 2006.
• The Portal Committee is at work defining functionality for “Phase I,” the first live production release of the portal (slated for January 2007).

Phase II of the project should begin in September 2007 and will showcase the portal presence at the University of Maryland.

You may monitor project progress at the UM Campus Portal Web site, www.portalproject.umd.edu. The site is designed so that milestones will be reflected in the “Timeline” tab, while committee and team activity, meeting announcements and minutes, and all documentation will be published in the “Committee Activity & Documents” tab.