On November 29 the UTM Portal Team will be launching myUTMartin, a portal project devoted to bringing together a wide range of information into one single web environment.

“MyUTMartin is basically a secure website that students use to make their lives easier,” said Information Technology Services Assistant Director Steve Holt. “We’re consolidating multiple user names and passwords that you use to login to systems such as Banner, Email and Blackboard, and turning it into what we call the ‘single sign-on’ feature, meaning you sign in only once to get access to all three.”

In January UTM received one of five $1.5 million grants from the CampusEAI Oracle Portal Grant Program. Besides having access to multiple UTM information systems on a single platform, students will also be able to customize their portal by choosing from a wide variety of ‘portlets’ or services to display information such as local weather, sports scores, movie reviews and more. “The possibilities of what we can put into the Portal are endless. If it’s out there on the Internet, or in our databases here on campus we can integrate it into the portal.” said Holt. “We are open to all suggestions regarding what should be added into the system.”

Holt added that even after the launch of myUTMartin, the university’s homepage will not undergo any major navigational changes, however there will be two text-entry fields added to the homepage where students will enter a login and password to sign on to the portal.

ITS will be giving away prizes to the first 100 students to log into the portal on November 29. There will also be numerous workstations set up around campus where students can get live demonstrations from ITS on how to use the portal. Any comments or suggestions regarding the portal project are to be directed to Steve Holt at webmaster@utm.edu.