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There is interest in forming a subgroup to assess the role of the portal within the present campus it ecosystem -- how it relates to a services focus, what are the strategic goals for the portal,  even whether it is still useful: these are among the questions that I am sure will be touched on.  So far, the following have expressed an interest in participating:

• Jim Leous: Penn State
• David Walker: UC Davis
• Deborah Lauriano: UC Davis
• Hampton Sublett: UC Davis
• Tamra Valadez: U Chicago
• Olivier Hirspieler: Université de Montréal
• David Badger: Rutgers University
• Paul Hobson: Cardiff University
• John Townsend: Liverpool JMU
• Dong Chen: Bowling Green State University
• Terry Houser: University of Michigan
• Piet Niederhausen: Georgetown University
• Scott Fullerton: University of Wisconsin - Madison
• Jim Helwig: University of Wisconsin - Madison
• Oren Sreebny - University of Washington

We might organize the inquiry along the following lines

1. Role of the portal with respect to other resources (i.e.,how is the portal situated with respect to the campus home page and various campus resources)
2. Relevance/Value-add of a portal (i.e., what value does it serve)
3. Critical Success Factors (i.e., what is needed for the portal to succeed)
4. Strategic goals for the portal (i.e., what capabilities should it provide or what campus goals should it serve) (note this is more likely to be specific to each institution, but it will be interesting to see the spread)
5. Portal user experience (i.e., does anyone manage the user experience, for which users, based on what assumptions? What's the intended "mental model" for the user to see the portal in the context of other web sites?)

4/15 mtg

Other questions that might be posed?

1. Sustainability of the portal.   Cost of integrating within the portal.
2. Technical environment that the portal is in (homogeneous, distributed, one ERP, many ERPs)
3. One community or various segments of the community (in U Chi there are three: admissions, alumni, student/staff).   Does the segmentation have to do with credentialing and idm
4. Definition of the portal.
5. Relates to the user life cycle.  Have the more successful portals been those that have addressed the user life cycle.
6. Cost of cloud computing and mobile computing on portal.
7. What is a portal
8. The old idea of a portal is maybe not what we need these days

Action items

1. Have people present use cases and critique them.
2. Scott: flywheel and leader
3. Next Steps:
   1. designate portal-keeper and convene subgroup mtg.
   2. Madison to provide case study using their portal inquiry