Web Portal

I receive my Web portal details about a month back. After playing around for a while, I think I have got a hang of quite a few features. Describing the layout is a Herculean task that I shall not embark upon. Instead what I shall do in this post is outline some of these features that I found interesting.

Quick Links: Shortcuts are provided to visit the School of Business web page, faculty profilethe campus bookstore, the library site, a page for online resources and the registrar's office.

The student rooster is some sort of a 'Introduce yourself' page where you fill in your personal / professional details and a short paragraph introducing yourself. The campus bookstore is a not-for-profit corporation that offers study material at the low price to Queen's students. So, in addition to the library, we can also buy second hand books from the bookstore, which is pretty cool.

page, the staff directory page, the student rooster, Administrative announcements: There were a few administrative announcements indicating the facebook community for the Queen's 2010 batch, Notebook requirements, etc. Similarly, there are also links for Course announcements and Career Announcements.

Tools: This consists of links to install network printers, upload and share files, share calenders, and access emails.

Fit To Lead Page: The Fit to lead page is a personal fitness guide tool. It has articles on healthy food habits, fitness tips, and something called a 'Cross trainer online fitness software' which I am yet to explore. I get a feeling that this page is something I will wanting to use quite regularly.

Team Room: The team room is a virtual room which basically lists your team members who are online, lists the assignments and discussions. We also can download IBM's 'Sametime' for instant messaging.

IT Support: The IT support page is extremely useful and has many articles how to set up many IT related infrastructure like Antivirus, network printer, usage guide of the web portal in addition to providing a host of downloads like Adobe Acrobat, Symantec Antivirus, MS Office patches, Java updates etc. Queen's is also a part of EduRoam which stands for Education Roam. This is a wireless network service that allows students, researchers, staff and faculty from Canadian educational institutions to securely access the Internet while visiting other partner universities. There are 10 partner universities, the names of which I shall update as soon as I get them. There are many other services like creating a personal webspace (of the format http://web.business.queensu.ca/graduate/userid), temporary renting of IT hardware infrastucture etc.

Exchange: The exchange link provides details on exchange programs, partner universities, the program details, and an online application for exchange applicants.

Courses: The courses link maintains a list of upcoming assignments, schedules etc for the coming 2 weeks. In addition, there is a Gartner Portal. The Gartner Portal gives us access to a lot of Gartner's research data. We can subscribe to topics of interest, and receive industry updates in our inbox as well. This would be something that most consulting candidates might take interest in, I guess. My current employers often share Gartner quadrants in our industry, and that is how I got introduced their research.

Email: The email web client is a Lotus Domino iNotes. As a Outlook user, the Lotus iNotes is something that I will have to get used to. A cursory glance indicates that the web client is considerably heavy and will need a laptop with good configuration.