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my.umich.edu Project Information
Home: my.umich.edu Introduction
About my.umich.edu
- What is my.umich.edu?
- Why is my.umich.edu needed?
- When will it be available?
- More frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Communications
- Monthly brown bag meetings: information and schedule
- Brown bag presentations (view outlines and download .ppt files)
- News articles
Previews
Update of Project Status and Plans
Presented by Linda Place at the April 5, 2001, my.umich brown bag meeting- Open pilot continues. The my.umich Project is continuing in open pilot. We have more than 15,000 users thus far even though we have relied only on word-of-mouth advertising to get the word out.
- Address book. We've been working on an address book for my.umich and have just finished writing the code for it. We still need to work on the user interface, but expect to begin testing it fairly soon. After an initial test (by our beta testers), we'll make it available to my.umich users.
- Speed. Slowness remains a concern for users and for us. We've already identified and fixed a number of problems that were affecting speed, and we continue to explore additional ways to improve speed. Speed is an important issue, and we won't move my.umich out of pilot and into production until my.umich is faster.
- E-mail improvements. We are moving forward on some changes to the underlying structure of our e-mail application. These changes will pave the way for implementation of some of the e-mail improvements and new features that people have been requesting through my.umich feedback.
- Skins. We have started work on a new "skin." Learning from our current design, we are working on a clean, efficient base design. (Users will then be able to select the skin -- or graphic look -- they want to use. The skin is what surrounds the my.umich services. Offering more than one skin will let users further customize their my.umich environment. It will also allow individual schools, colleges, departments, and units to have a personalized design for their members.)
- News Service. We are making good progress on a revision of our News service. We've been working with The Michigan Daily staff so that both the my.umich News service and the Daily use the RSS Web standard for news delivery and receipt. Use of this standard format will allow my.umich to accept news feeds not only from the Daily, but from many other Web news sources. We've got the code working fairly well and now need to create a user interface.
- Making U-M History. Thanks to the U-M Bentley Historical Library, we have new information in the Making U-M History panel.
- Moving panels. In response to user feedback, we are making the Making U-M History and U-M Highlights panels movable. This change means that when you customize your home page you will be able to move these panels. We are tesing the change on our development server and will move it to the production server shortly. Just as commercial Web sites have banner advertising, my.umich needs to include institutional messages from its sponsor -- U-M. Therefore, you won't be able to remove those panels, but you will be able to put them where you want on your page.
- Do you have questions? Send your questions to my.umich.questions@umich.edu. Please be aware that, as are many parts of the University, we are waiting to hear what our budget will be for the coming fiscal year. Until those decisions are made, we may not be able to tell you specific plans for the coming year. We can tell you that we hope to continue to refine and improve our current services and to partner with more University units to offer additional services to additional audiences within the U-M community.