Center for Information Technology Services

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Web Development Group Leads the Way

Although all the schools and administrative units at UMB are responsible for maintaining content for their own webpages, the CITS Web Development Group is available to facilitate collaboration, provide development services, and consult on matters of technological design and emerging online technologies such as ColdFusion. In addition to its ongoing work developing/ updating websites for various schools and departments, here is a sampling of the many recent and upcoming projects in which the CITS Web Development Group is involved:

  • Develop Student, Faculty, Staff, Executive, and Alumni Intranets. (See article elsewhere in this newsletter.)
  • Develop online HR forms processing application.
  • Develop Institutional Research & Planning online application to improve the existing process of gathering feedback from Faculty and Alumni.
  • Develop online FTP migration application that can be used by developers to migrate files from Development to Production webserver.
  • Develop online Help Desk application that will track all major applications on campus and the help desk responsible for assisting with each.

For staff listing and additional information regarding Web development, resources, and tools, please refer to the CITS/Web Development Group website (of course!) at: (http://www.umaryland.edu/
cits/web/), or email the Web Development staff at webdevelopment@umaryland.edu.

 

New Intranet Webpages Launched

By the time you are reading this article, the CITS Web Development Department will have launched its new "Intranet" webpages. These new, portal-like webpages have been developed in order to help members of the UMB community find online information and news in a more effective and efficient manner. The five new webpages respectively cater to Faculty, Staff, Students, Executives, and Alumni. Users will have the ability to set one of these pages as their default, and then further define what topics of interest they would like to see on it (e.g., Schools, Technology, News, Budget & Finance.) Each of the five Intranet pages will have links to a variety of other UMB Schools, Departments, and online resources on the left side of the screen, based on the user's affiliation with UMB. This will make it easier for Faculty, Staff, Students, Executives and Alumni to find UMB information online that is specific to their needs and interests. The center section of each webpage will be updated on a regular basis with recent news and information, while the right section of each webpage will contain dynamic links to online information based on topics of interest that each user defines.

Here are some examples of how these pages can be customized:

  • A member of the CITS staff might choose "Staff" as his or her default page and "Technology" as the topic of interest in order to get updates, news, and links to UMB Technology related activities and information.
  • A student at the School of Nursing might select "Student" as his or her default page and then "School of Nursing" as the topic of interest in order to get student related updates, news, and links for the School of Nursing.

In addition, the Intranet pages will provide individuals with the ability to sign up to get "eNews"-notifications by email on a weekly basis of news posted to the webpages on topics that interest them. But eNews will only be sent to those people who have signed up to receive email for the News that matches the topics they have selected. So, for example, if there is a Medical related event coming up, only those who have signed up to receive "Medical" related News will get the article sent to them.

For more information, please see the UMBnet website selection and customization page: http://www.umaryland.edu/
intranet/, or contact the CITS Web Development Department at webdevelopment@umaryland.edu.