For years, students had to hunt all over the Internet to find ACES, Blackboard, webmail, menus for Merchants on Points and other University services. Beginning last week, however, a newly expanded DevilNet offered one stop shopping for all these sites. By the end of next semester, the Office of Information Technology will also introduce a student portal with more direct access to some of the most commonly used services, OIT officials said.
The student-run DevilNet--a portal site owned by the Duke Student Publishing Company, which also owns The Chronicle and The Chronicle Online--completed its merger with webmail service MyDuke.com last Thursday. Since then, students using MyDuke to check their email have been redirected to DevilNet, where they can access webmail along with links for a wide range of other student services.
OIT's portal is not yet up and running, but department officials said a pilot should be available by the end of the spring semester. At this point, members OIT staff are working with Duke Student Government, the office of student affairs and other student and administrative groups to determine the site's architecture and content, said Dan McCarriar, special projects senior manager for OIT.
One of the main differences between DevilNet and the OIT portal is the issue of access to the University's various restricted sites. While DevilNet now has webmail access thanks to MyDuke, for security reasons it cannot currently offer its own logins to ACES or Blackboard.
"We are in the far future considering getting web authorization, so that once students log in to DevilNet, they can access webmail, ACES, Blackboard, without having to log into every single application," said senior Brandon Shapiro, DevilNet president. "Hopefully that will be this school year, but I don't know."
OIT officials said getting such access is complicated because of security issues.
"The problem [with DevilNet having such access] is when you get into systems like ACES, there's an information accessibility problem, just things like authentication," McCarriar said. "It's a touchy information access issue."
The OIT portal, however, will most likely provide access to all of these services. Although specifics of the site are still in the planning stages, McCarriar said he and other members of the content team have an idea of what they would like to see.
"One thing I would hope to provide in our portal is more of a dashboard view of various models: information feeding from ACES, but you don't have to log into ACES to see that. It would be more of a dynamic interface instead of a list of links," McCarriar said.
Although both sites will eventually provide similar services, members of both teams said they would not necessarily be competing with each other.
"The front page of DevilNet will have student polls, headlines from The Chronicle, while the OIT portal will focus more on an official Duke University thing, with links for professors, staff, even departments that are non-students and non-professors. I personally don't view DevilNet as a competitive service per se. It's sort of different scopes," said Stefan Negritoiu '02, MyDuke's creator.
Although DevilNet has existed since the mid '90s, its popularity declined when the open forum the site used to host was removed, Shapiro said. He added that he hopes the addition of MyDuke's webmail services, as well as the constant addition of new links and other resources, will draw more students to the site.
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