Portal-savvy

By Judy Lin

If you know to contact CTS for phone service, CHR for staff training and CTO for tickets to a Royce Hall event — congratulations! — you have mastered shortcuts to Bruinspeak.

But if you're new to campus or your brain jams up when faced with yet another enigmatic acronym, UCLA's new Campus Services Web portal can help guide you to getting a parking permit, planning a campus event and more. The new portal is a solution to the exasperating problem of quickly finding your way to the services you need.

"More and more people are relying on the Web, but many of them get frustrated when they can't find what they're looking for, and they give up and leave," said Greg Partipilo, project manager with Administrative Information Services (AIS). He led a portal development team that offered an in-depth view of the new way online information is now organized at a Feb. 27 presentation at the Anderson School's Korn Convocation Hall.

The new portal contains 4,000 pages of information taken from 60 previously separate sites within the Department of Business and Financial Services — from accounting to travel. The portal is centrally hosted by AIS, but each unit maintains access to revise and update its information.

One of the biggest challenges in creating the new portal, Partipilo said, was determining how best to organize it. A 35-person, campuswide work group spent five months determining how to arrange information "taxonomically" — classifying it by type rather than by organization — as well as coming up with easy-to-understand names.

For example, instead of having to know that Communications Technology Services (CTS) handles phone service, you can now search for "phone" from the UCLA gateway www.ucla.edu and will be taken to information you need to order an office phone, as well as links on the same page to other kinds of communication technology — cable and video services, for example.

A common look and feel to all the portal pages make viewing easier on the eyes and navigation simpler. In addition, articles written specifically for the portal provide information on wide-ranging topics; each article has its own ID number which can be called up in a search from the UCLA gateway.

For example, Betsy Metzgar, assistant director of the UCLA Events Office, said that her office has added an article that makes event planning less of a hassle, with step-by-step instructions and direct links to all the different departments you might need to contact.

"The beauty of the portal is that we're able to populate our site with other departments' articles and vice versa. I call it cross-pollination," Metzgar said. "The result is that our portal site is far more robust."

Ultimately, the portal developers hope to add even more UCLA services to the site.

"We want to help you satisfy that frustrated reader — the one you want to get to your site quickly and take the action you want them to take," said Partipilo.

Visit the portal's home page by going to UCLA's gateway and clicking the link to "Campus Services." To see a recap of the BruinTech Seminar, search for article 1003572.