by Skip Warnick

The university’s portal is set to enter its second year in production and, though portal development will continue to focus primarily on student applications, the time has come to also concentrate on faculty and staff services.

While faculty and staff have been able to log in to the portal from the very beginning, there have been and still are no faculty/staff-specific applications. Now, with your help, that is about to change. The portal group has already identified and begun development on some new faculty/staff features. E-mail is already available, and we are working on a tool that will provide access to timesheets. What we don’t know is what else you think would be useful to have in the portal.

Please take time to log in to www.my.umd.edu, look around, and get a feel for how the portal works. Then, use the Suggestion Box to submit your ideas. Think of how nice it would be to be able to log in once and have access to a variety of tools without the need to authenticate multiple times. If you are interested in helping to design the faculty/staff experience, please send e-mail to portalhelp@umd.edu. We could use your help and are looking forward to your feedback.