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This one is a doozy... As we approach the final week before launch, we're putting the finishing touches on lots of little things around the site. Most of the changes are subtle ones that you probably wouldn't notice unless we pointed them out... so here we go:
I'll keep this one short since its late...
Finally, as always, please contact me with any comments, questions, problems or suggestions: collier@umbc.edu
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We just posted an update with the following changes:
A second enhancement is the way we have revamped the topic pages. Topic pages are now dynamically generated and will be much more consistent across the various topic pages. This allows DoIT to quickly modify a topic page and should improve the usability and consistency of myUMBC.
A third enhancement is we have revamped the way that calendars and events work. We redesigned the interface and made it much easier to add events. Calendars now provide filters and an iCal interface so you can subscribe specific events to a google calendar or mobile device and always be kept up to date.
All these changes are designed to make myUMBC more usable and more integral to the day-to-day needs of the UMBC community. We want and need your feedback but we ask that you give these changes a chance. Our user-testing has shown that once people get acclimated to the new interface they find this more intuitive than prior myUMBC versions. That said, we need your feedback.
Please Visit the MyUMBC BETA Site at: http://myumbc3.my.umbc.edu/ This site is a work in progress but should provide you with a sense of the changes being made.
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Thanks for taking a second to check out the myUMBC Fan Club group. We're going to use this group as our way to stay connected to you UMBC community.
I'm glad you asked. A lot.
First off, let me apologize for any inconvenience over the past few weeks as we had to turn some features of myUMBC off in order to upgrade them for the Fall. The new myUMBC is about a bazillion times more complicated than the old one and we're trying to ensure that when students flood back in late August that everything is going to work smoothly. We're still expecting a few hiccups, but we're working hard to minimize them.
We have an official launch window: Aug 14th - 15th. Its called a window because we're going to try and do it on the 14th, but if things go wrong (and they will), it may take until the 15th to get things back up and running.
There is still a ton of things left to do, though. Until the start of the semester, every day or two we will try and push out new features, content and bug fixes. If you run into any problems with the new myUMBC, let me know as soon as you can. We'll try and get the bugs squashed ASAP.
Groups are the biggest and most ambitious new feature of myUMBC. They will hopefully provide a simple and easy way for the UMBC to connect and collaborate. Groups can be used for student org advertising and planning, simple websites for organizations, or collaboration areas for committees. We've purposefully made the tools in Groups simple and straightforward, because we don't need to be the best (there are plenty of tools online that are better at any given task), we just need to help the parts of the community that need help. As the community uses Groups, we'll be paying attention and adding and modifying features in order to best meet UMBC's needs.
As I've mentioned, each group consists of a set of "tools" you can use:
We've recently pushed out the two biggest (and most critical) tools of groups: Members and Discussions.
An important function of groups is the ability to make your content "public". Any spotlight, news, event, discussion, media can be marked as public and will appear under their respective section of the Community menu. This makes it easy for your group to advertise their content to the entire UMBC community. Once content is made public, it can be pawed and commented on by anyone logged in to myUMBC.
So, if your group is planning an event, post it to your group calendar with tentative dates while you work out the details and when things are finalized, make it public, and then send your group members out to paw the event so it appears on the myUMBC Start page.
We're now working on the last remaining parts of groups:
Thanks for everyone's understanding and support,
Collier
PS - The image is by one of my favorite artists, David Lanham. I think it accurately represents what the past two years have felt like as we've worked on myUMBC.
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