Thursday, April 11, 2002

U. of Michigan Cancels a Closely Watched Portal Project By FLORENCE OLSEN The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor announced on Monday that it would close down its bellwether portal, my.umich.edu, on June 30, a little more than a year after offering the personalized Web space to its students. Campus officials say the university can no longer sustain such a complex and expensive software-development project on its own. Michigan has no plans to replace the portal with a commercial alternative. The portal provides students with Web-based information and services such as personalized bookmarks for Web sites, calendars, and e-mail, to which they can gain access from any computer. The Michigan portal is one of several such experiments that technology administrators throughout academe have been watching closely. The technology is still quite new and experimental, and many institutions are deciding how to proceed in acquiring technology that they say is important to their institution. Similar projects remain under way at a few large universities, among them the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Washington at Seattle, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. However, Michigan officials say that it no longer seems prudent for the institution to be off on its own developing portal technology. "It was ambitious, and I think we learned a lot from it," says James L. Hilton, associate provost for academic-, information-, and instructional-technology affairs. He says the university is still interested in the portal, but he adds, "I think we're more interested in not going it alone." Other factors weighed in the decision. The university must reallocate money that it was spending on the portal to more-pressing academic-technology needs, such as the latest high-end statistical packages, graphics software, and geographic information systems for computer labs and public computer sites on the campus, says Carl F. Berger, a professor of science and technology education and director of advanced academic technologies at Michigan. While the state's budget squeeze has not forced severe budget cuts at the university, the portal project has cost about $1-million annually for both years of the project's life. The effort, which was carried out using Apple Computer's WebObjects programming tools, required the integration of many sources of information and different computer applications. "That's what was ambitious and expensive about it," says Mr. Hilton. The results were not blazingly fast, a fact that annoyed some students. Some of the online services that were developed for the portal will survive in other forms, according to campus-computing officials. Students will still be able to review and pay their university phone bills, check their transcripts, and post notices in a public commons online. After June 30, university officials say they plan to focus on making the institution's main Web site, http://www.umich.edu, more useful and easy to navigate for students and faculty and staff members. No layoffs were announced as a result of the decision to close down the portal. Michigan also plans to become more involved in academic collaborations such as the university-sponsored Open Knowledge Initiative and uPortal efforts. The Open Knowledge Initiative is a collaborative effort, led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, to develop a course-management system with non-proprietary, or open-source, components. The uPortal is a grassroots effort among college and university programmers to create guidelines and standards for developing academic portals. Mr. Hilton says that he remains "skeptical of attempts within a single university to build something and sustain it internally over the long haul." He says that academic institutions should be focused on using open-source software in collaborative efforts in which colleges and universities have "core competencies." Wisconsin's portal, which was begun at about the same time as the Michigan portal, will soon be expanded to include faculty and staff members, says Brian Rust, communications manager for the information-technology division at Madison. "This isn't something that we just think is a cool feature," he says. It's actually meant to address a strategic issue, which is to make the university a more accessible, user-friendly place." At Michigan, Mr. Berger says the my.umich portal held great promise and will be missed. "We're all disappointed" at having to shut it down, he says. "By no means was it an easy decision." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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