Things are moving along nicely and we're slowly but surely ironing out kinks in myUMBC.  Thanks for everyone who's sent us feedback. Its invaluable. We can't fix what we don't know is broken.

Just a few changes today:

• Group Header Titles Now Optional - Groups can now opt not to show the title text for their group if they upload a custom header.  This lets groups be a little more creative in how they customize their space.
• Spotlight Archives now work correctly inside of groups.
• Minor corrections to What's New guide

And now for something completely different...

- Collier

People are still getting used to the new myUMBC and finding things we've missed, so we spent most of the day fixing problems and answering questions.  We do have a few updates though:

• What's New - We've put together a short guide of many of the new features of myUMBC.  It is by no means complete, but should be enough to show you places you might want to explore.  Check it out
• Admin Tools - While you may not see all of them because of your role, myUMBC contains references to hundreds of resources throughout the UMBC web and beyond.  To help us manage the chaos, we're constantly creating and refining custom tools.  You may never see these tools, but they're vital for us to be able to keep track of what shows where and to whom.
• Bug fixes and tweaks
• Custom background colors should be seen more consistently throughout myUMBC.
• Fixing broken and missing links from topic pages.
• Tons of typos and text tweaks.
• Something New - We're in the early planning stages of a way for you to "follow" content in myUMBC, so you're kept up to date on any changes or comments.  This feature would also allow you to follow a group without having to become a member.   Stay tuned.

- Collier

Thanks for all of the feedback so far, we're listening and doing the best we can to make everybody happy. Its not easy, but we're trying.

We couldn't do too much today as we spent most of the day responding to emails and phone calls, but we squeezed some stuff in:

• Appearance Settings - This is by far the most consistently received comment, so we figured we'd fix this one fast.  Sure, yellow isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it is one of our school colors... and yes, the yellow we were using for our school color isn't the "official" yellow, but had we used the official yellow, eyes would be bleeding... seriously.  So, we built an appearance settings page for you.  Its under your name, just where it was before.  We picked some colors you can use that we thought were tolerable.  However, if you still think our sense of style is lacking, you can pick your own color too.  So there, everyone wins.
• FYI, the official yellow is #FFCC00.  Try it out and then send us a note thanking us for not using it. ;-)
• Alphabetize your Favorites - If you've gone star-clicking-crazy and created a huge mess of favorites, there is now a button to alphabetize them for you on the Favorites page.
• Bug fixes and tweaks
• The login banner on topic pages is a bit more prominent.  This is important because many links now require you to be logged in.
• We removed the "myUMBC is new, send us feedback" banner from framed pages to save a little room for people with smaller screens.
• Links in the Alerts dashboard should not load in the proper window.
• Menus should be reliable and less likely to hang around after you're done with them.

A Special Request from the myUMBC Team

I always try and stress how important feedback is to us.  It is. It drives everything we do.  Every feature and every change was prompted by feedback of some kind.  myUMBC serves an extremely diverse user-base and we'd be foolish to think we'd make everybody happy with any change.  We are people, just like you, we work hard, we try our best, and for everything we've done that you like, we've probably done something else you don't.  We love to hear from you, even if its negative.  All we ask is that you be patient and try things out before you pass judgement, be specific as possible about any problems you may experience, and be respectful of the fact that there is a human being on the other side of the feedback box that cares a great deal about making myUMBC better for everyone.

Can't wait to hear from you all,

- Collier

So, some of you may have noticed that the new myUMBC is NOW LIVE!!

We're pretty freakin' excited about it, and have received a lot of positive feedback.  The most negative thing we've heard a few times is that the yellow background is causing severe abdominal discomfort. We're looking into it.

The launch went pretty smoothly, so all we have to report today are a few simple bug fixes that folks stumbled upon:

• Fixed a typo in the Dashboard.
• Updated the list of your upcoming spotlights to be a little more intuitive. We also made it so group members who can post spotlights can see all upcoming spotlights in a group so they don't post a duplicate.
• Group categories should now be copied on content.
• Tags should now be copied on spotlights.
• Prevented Graduate Applicant and Admit from being incorrectly selected after editing existing content.
• Added a Print This Page button to pages that load inside the myUMBC frame.
• Fixed audience bug that was affecting the iPhone app.
• Added some more "page moved" links for services.

Today's phrase was "put a bow on it", meaning, lets wrap this myUMBC thing up and call it done.  And we did. From this point forward, no more new features, just fleshing out some missing content and putting some extra polish on things.

That said, we managed to sneak something kinda cool in today:

• "Magical" Search Box - It's not as magical as an iPad, yet, but give us a week or two to get it warmed up.  Basically, we've given the search box in the top right of myUMBC the ability to recommend links, groups, and other content to you.  It's smart in that it won't recommend faculty links to students and vice-versa, but its also dumb in that it will only recommend things that we tell it to recommend.  We're going to be watching what people search for and use that data to help flesh out the recommendations.  Keep in mind, this isn't a full-fledged search.  That's a job best left to Google.  However, if we can make it so that when you type "pay bill", we give you the direct link to pay your bill, then why not?

Get Ready for the Big Day: August 14th

I was lazy last night (read: sleep deprived) and didn't write a post, so you get all of yesterday's goodness mixed in with today's:

• Start - The new Start page has been enabled.  We hope you like it.  We have some neat ideas for this page in the future.
• Topic Pages - While we're nowhere near complete, Topic pages are starting to be flushed out.  We will be right upfront about saying that we're going to make some mistakes with which links show where.  We've completely changed the system we use to manage links in myUMBC (meaning, we actually implemented a system rather than doing everything by hand, ugh) and there will be some bumps moving links into the new myUMBC.  Just let us know if you don't find something that you think you should and we'll fix it as fast as we can.
• Sidebar Content - We now show related content in the sidebar.  This should make it easier to find other new and interesting things to check out.
• Feed Discovery for Browsers - Most modern web browsers should now show you a little button in your address bar allowing you quick and easy access to the RSS feeds that come from most tools in myUMBC.  This makes it really easy to get myUMBC content into tools like Google Reader.
• Event Attendee Emails - If you're allowing attendees on your event, you will now get an email when someone signs up.
• Spotlight Archive - You can now browse past spotlights by role, date and even keyword.
• Cleanup of typos and random bug fixes.

We are only 3 days away from our big upgrade.  The changes will be slowing down as we start prepping for launch, but I'll keep posting them.

If you haven't already, please vote or leave a reply to our poll, or leave us feedback.  Your input is extremely important to us.

Thanks,
- Collier