During the weekend of March 5-6, the CQU Student Portal (http://mycqu.cqu.edu.au) went live.

The new portal offers our students a one-page personalised view of their courses, past exams, emails, calendar and alerts.

For those students taking on campus courses, all class times have been pre-loaded into their individual calendar.

The course window has direct links to the proper course in the relevant course management system without the student having to know where to login.

The interface puts all the power of Course Resources Online a just a click away. The system also selects relevant textbooks directly from the bookshop.

Behind the scenes, a series of changes were implemented that will improve service to students.

Instead of seven email systems, all students are on a single email system.

The team has also introduced a single sign-on architecture, so that when a student logs into any one of the managed systems (portal, email, calendar, course profile, past exams, blackboard, webfuse) they have access to all of them without logging on again.

Like most portals, the system was produced by a cross-functional team.

Among others, the Division of University Relations contributed to the branding, the CTI group handled servers, networks and conversions, the CMS team contributed to meeting the needs of international students, the AIS group in DTLS did the requirements, custom portlet code and look and feel.

A total of 41 focus groups were held with various constituencies to understand the needs.

Webmaster Bill Gonch said the portal team would also like to thank the project sponsor, Dr Jeanne Mcconachie, without whose drive the project would never have happened.

Despite all of the planning, technology projects always seem to come down to the last weekend. Over the weekend the team converted data, did final testing and, yes, fixed a few little problems.

On Monday, the project team took a deep breath and started planning release 2.

If you have a problem with the portal, you should contact helpdesk@cqu.edu.au. If you have general comments, please send them to webmaster@cqu.edu.au.

Photo: Core Project team members Luke Parsons, Simon Coggins, Brad Marshall, David Binney, Nathaniel Fitzgerald-Hood, Bill Gonch, John Voss, Adrian Yarrow, Brigette Muller, Julie Flemming.