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There is some debate on the Ja-Sig list about the University of Michigan's decision to abandon their own portal, due to escalating costs. The community is trying to decide whether this is a rejection of the portal concept, or whether a bespoke portal is far too ambitious for an individual institution... ========================== Interesting article from the Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/free/2002/04/2002041101t.htm The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor announced on Monday that it will 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 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. ======================================= A reminder that we are now taking bookings for Portals2002. Glossy leaflets should be arriving on your VC's desk soon, but in the meantime the place to go is http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/portals2002 Paul Browning was asking for feedback from the Nottingham training event. I'd say it went well, and was enjoyable, albeit intensive. But then I'm biased! Any other participants care to comment? Steve Stephen Brydges Learning Support Services Floor 12, Tower University of Nottingham NG7 2RD 0115 9515035