What's New in the Portal

This year the portal has undergone a transformation and has a fresh new look and feel, improved functionality and a range of new features to enable you to find information more easily.

Introducing the Virtual Campus

The portal is just one of the web applications that make up the 'Solent Virtual Campus'. Others include myCourse, WWW website, Hello Uni and the Students' Union website.

Links to all these sites are available from the 'Explore Virtual Campus' drop down menu on the Portal which will be available on every page.

Portal Apps

Your personalised applications such as email, your library books, your results and registration are now contained in the 'My Apps' drop down menu on the Portal which will be available on every page.

Staff will be able to customise which additional apps appear on their own menu.

Apps dashboard

Once logged into the Portal you will be able to make use of your 'Apps Dashboard' which' is a view to some of your personalised applications such as favourite websites, favourite numbers and library loans, it is also used as a shortcut to popular applications, such as the phone book and your email, and to popular content such as news, events and sports results.

You will find the 'Apps Dashboard' on the home page after you have logged in.

Mega menu

One of the most noticeable design changes about the new portal is the new full width drop down menu.

This new menu makes it easier to get to information quickly and easily. Mouse over the grey tabs to see the expanded menu. You will find that pages have been sorted according to function.

If you find that the drop-down menus are getting in your way, you can toggle them off using the button at the end of the mega menu - to the left of the apps tab.

New structure

With over 7,000 portal pages it can be difficult to find information and some very useful portal pages can be buried deep within the site.

This latest version of the Portal breaks the normal habit of organising the vast amount of content into departmental areas. Portal users should not have to know in advance which department deals with what information in order to find something.

New tabs

The names of the tabs have been changed to better reflect the content underneath them:

New tabs on the portal

Old Tabs	New tabs
Home (students) Campus Link (staff)	Home
Course (students & staff)	N/A
Services (students & staff)	Support (new!)
Library (students & staff)	Library
University (students)         Faculties (staff)	Campus (new!)
N/A	Careers (new!)
SDP (staff)	Strategy (staff)
Teaching & Learning (staff)	Teaching & Learning (staff)

 

The tabs that are for staff only will appear once you have logged in with your staff log in account.

Improved accessibility & usability

The Southampton Solent University staff and student Portal aims to conform to the following web accessibility guidelines (W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines priority 1 and 2 guidelines and XHTML 1.0) in order to ensure that the website is accessible to users with a range of disabilities, including those with visual impairments.

We have a new accessibility page which lists some of the ways we have improved accessibility on the new portal. 

We have a text only version of the Portal and a mobile version with features such as different navigation for people viewing from mobile devices is planned.

Improved log in - remembers page you were on

In the previous version, once you logged in, you were directed back to the home page. You can now log in from any page and still be on that page.

The login box can also remember your username if you want it to. Remember not to check this box if using a public computer though!

Events

The existing news area is really popular and allows users from all over the university to add news items to be displayed for staff & students. We have put in a place a similar events module so anyone can add events to be displayed on the Portal. 

Printable version of any page

Printing the information on the web page is much easier in the new version. Select File then Print Preview on your web browser to see the printable version.

Share with your friends

The portal now has share capabilities at the bottom of each page so you can alert your friends on Facebook and Twitter (and many other sites) to any interesting stories found on the portal.

There are also ‘Print’, ‘Email’ and ‘Add to Favourites’ links here as well for easy access.