Wednesday, October 10, 2001

Portal Provider Notifies Customers It Will Close by Week's End By SCOTT CARLSON Mascot Network, a company that provides student-portal services to dozens of colleges, sent a surprise e-mail message to its customers on Monday: The company is going out of business and the portal service will be shut down by the end of the week. The news has irritated some university officials who had invested faith and time, if not money, in the portal service, which is something like an online bulletin board for campus events. Students can also see pictures of peers and get e-mail addresses through the service, and some pages have links to local sites, such as the campus newspaper. Users usually get to the site through a link on their university's Web page. The company's Web site listed more than 50 colleges that used the service -- from Columbia University to Wayne County Community College, in Michigan -- although the sites of some of those listed didn't show a link to a local Mascot page. Tobias E. Schmidt, a server administrator at Winona State University, in Minnesota, posted a notice on that university's Mascot portal on Monday, telling students to save information on the site before it goes offline and is deleted. Mr. Schmidt says that some colleges haven't gotten a letter about Mascot's demise. "My supervisor has been calling other schools that we know use it, and they were never notified that the plug was being pulled." Representatives of Mascot did not return calls and e-mails from The Chronicle. Winona State hasn't lost money, at least. "We were still in an 18-month trial period," Mr. Schmidt says. "More than anything, it gives the IT department a poor public image. Here we were, offering this service, and now it's going to be yanked away." Abby Brody, the director of the Web team at Alfred University, in New York, says that since her university signed on with Mascot in the spring, it had paid a small amount for a two-year contract -- "well under the $60,000 they were going to charge us" -- although she won't give an exact figure. But there were other related costs. Her office spent a lot of energy promoting the portal and gathering data for it, such as student profiles and pictures. At the request of Mascot, the university even hired a "campus DJ," a student who would provide homegrown content for the site. Mascot promised to reimburse the university for the student's salary, but "they never sent the money," she says. Ms. Brody saw signs that Mascot was in trouble soon after the university signed on last spring -- Mascot wavered between ad-based and subscriber-based business models, she says. But she thought the company would last through its two-year contract with the university, and she passed up a recent opportunity to sign up for a portal service through Blackboard. She says Mascot's demise is cause for concern. "There isn't a lot of money for IT, so a lot of IT departments are relying on these third-party vendors," she says. "And who knows what the future for third parties might be?" Ms. Brody adds that Mascot will be missed, because this year's freshmen had used the site heavily since the university's portal went online in July. "They used it over the summer, so when they got to class in the fall, they already had an idea who they were going to meet," she says. "I'm less angry than I am disappointed. It was just starting to click with them." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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