Within a month Eagleweb will be completely defunct and will be replaced by a single site, myAU portal, that will provide easy access to WebAdvisor, Ashland email, registrar information, campus announcements, department and team collaboration sites.

The site is accessible from Ashland.edu by going to the top right corner and finding it under “login.” The portal has been planned for several years but was finally funded in March of 2011 and was functional in 2012.

In addition to replacing Eagleweb the portal also takes the place of the eagle-mail messages that get sent out to students to keep them up to date with campus events. In the portal, announcements and campus events are ordered by date in order to inform students what events are coming up and ones that have expired. Students can also post bulletins that everyone on the portal can see.

While the portal has been operation for several months, Director of Portal and Collaboration Services, Terrance Henry has been working to get the portal ready for heavy faculty and student traffic.

“We have to get content onto the portal before we can do too much,” Henry said. Currently, the portal team consisting of Henry, Sheila Howard, who serves as the Portal and Collaboration Services Manager, and Scott Stoops, who serves as the Portal and Collaboration Services Administrator, has been working to prepare the portal for wide use by students and organization.

The portal allows for much more involvement from campus clubs and organizations than the Ashland website. A frequent complaint leveled at IT is the website does not allow organizations or groups to edit the information on their web pages. On the portal however, editing information is much simpler and can be done by any member of that organization.

The biggest benefit to the portal is that nearly everything is on one page. Ashland email, calendars, tasks, bulletins, announcements, Webadvisor and course catalogs are all on the same screen. The only web resource not on the portal is Angel, though there is a link to it.

“The only reason we can’t integrate Angel into the portal is because the Angel site doesn’t have a plug in for the Portal,” said Stoops.

Another feature exclusive to the Portal is a notification that will appear next to the weather and email tab that will inform students of important notices, such as an overdue balance or a form that needs to be turned in.

The site may be in its earliest form now but in future semesters the development team hopes the portal will become the first page students go to.

“We are trying to get to a place that the portal becomes a self service site for students,” Henry said. Henry hopes this self-service model will work well with students and staff. “We want students to have access to information and forms in the middle of the night rather than having to wait the next day.”

Henry says the next step is for all of the individual departments and organizations to update their own information and customize their pages.

The address for the portal is myau.ashland.edu.