SharePoint in Higher Education

We've had an ongoing consulting project with Central Michigan University for the past nine months. The project involved the design and development of a new student portal based on SPS 2003. CMU has had a homegrown portal for students, but it had become outdated and they wanted something that was more flexible and had more features. They also needed the portal to be the front door to a new SAP Campus Management System that has been under development for over a year.

The new CMU Student Portal launched last week. Here is a screen shot of the home page:



CMU has approximately 20,000 students that will be using the portal. One of the most exciting aspects of the design is that each student will get their very own My Site. Prior to the new portal, students did not have a single place on the CMU network where they could store all of their important documents. Each college/department had its own network storage and students could use those file shares as they were enrolled in courses for a given college/network.

Now, with My Sites, students will have one place to store their documents AND it is accessible from anywhere they can open up a browser and get on the Internet and authenticate to the CMU SharePoint servers. This will be a vast improvement over what they have had. Here is a screen shot of a CMU My Site:



Lots of folks from CMU and SharePoint Solutions worked very hard on this project: Eric Bellmore, Sarah Bendele, Shane Young, Mike Glisson, Tony Bierman, Scott Mayo, Kevin Pine and myself were all part of the team. Congratulations to everyone!