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Higher Education Portal Solutions

Education portals create a common gateway to the data and services that the people throughout your university need to effectively share information and work together on projects. Education portals can be built on technologies you may already have—such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Windows Server—extending the value of your investment in Microsoft technologies.

Some of the things you can do with a Microsoft portal solution include:

• Record and share grades with students electronically
• Create online communities for students, faculty, administrators, and alumni to collaborate
• Facilitate sharing of best practices among faculty and administrators
• Enable students, faculty, administrators, and alumni to access your institution’s resources anytime from any connected device
• Post lesson plans, coursework, research content, and more to online document libraries
• Provide Web-based class registration, tuition and financial aid payments, and other services
• Create dashboards that show up-to-date student performance data to inform instruction and decisions
• Share information with your board of directors and community members

Solving Real-World Challenges

A Web portal can help you address several key challenges, including:

• Innovative and effective instructional resources and methods not being shared among faculty members
• Uninformed and uninvolved alumni and community leaders
• Students receiving only periodic feedback on performance and progress
• Student information, such as class schedules, health records, and grade transcripts kept in different places requiring different systems to access
• Not having access to the information needed to make informed decisions

Key Benefits

Microsoft education portal solutions can help you:

• Increase student engagement. Give students easy ways to connect with their professors and their peers to get them more engaged in their classes.
• Facilitate anytime, anywhere learning. Provide your students with single sign-on access to learning materials and campus resources—from library content to complete online courses—at any time, from virtually anywhere, and from any type of connected device. You’ll create a virtual campus that never closes.
• Make better decisions. Inform routine decisions and long-range strategic planning across all business functions and disciplines with accurate, readily-available data presented in intuitive and familiar formats.
• Let faculty focus on research and instruction. Make it easier for your faculty to find instructional resources; assess students; record and track grades; and communicate with their colleagues and students, and they will have more time and energy to focus on important research and facilitate meaningful learning experiences that meet the unique needs of individual students.
• Streamline administrative tasks. Make it easy for students to register for classes, access financial aid information, pay their tuition, sign-up for lunch programs, report absences, and more from any computer.
• Connect with your community. By proving simple and customized ways to access information and connect with your institution, you can reap the benefits of strong connections with alumni and other members of the broader community.

Why Choose Microsoft?

With Microsoft education portal solutions, you get:

• Reduced costs. Take advantage of your existing investments in Microsoft products, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Office, and Windows Server.
• Flexible functionality and deployment. Microsoft education portals are simple enough for novice users, yet robust enough for power users. A scalable, standards-based platform means you can start small and roll-out new features and functionality as you are ready.
• Familiar and intuitive interfaces. Adding and customizing content on your portal is easy thanks to an intuitive interface and the ability to integrate with familiar Microsoft Office applications, such as Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Office Excel.
• Personalized, role-based access. Providing single sign-on access to content on your portal based on role is simple, so you can ensure everyone can find what they need and only what they are authorized to see. Setting-up personalized dashboards that put key information and applications (such as class schedules and e-mail) in one place is a snap.
• Robust support community. Join a large group of other educators from around the world who are having success with portals and sharing their best practices.
• Strong partner ecosystem. Microsoft has partners you can trust to help you build the right portal solution for your institutions.
• World-Class Microsoft national education services practice. A dedicated national Microsoft education services team assists partners and customers with their enterprise collaboration strategy and architectural designs using best practices within K-12 and higher education markets.

Customer Success

Regis University had been looking at ways to provide its faculty, staff, and students secure access to its portal from anywhere at any time. They wanted to guarantee complete functionality while ensuring granular policy-based access control and a consistent end-user experience. For Regis University it was paramount that the integrity of its SharePoint Portal Server 2003 implementation and the applications and resources it housed was maintained to deliver a seamless user experience, regardless of location. That lead then to a Microsoft-based solution. Read the complete case study.

Next Steps

• Find a Microsoft partner to help you plan out and create a portal solution at your university.
• Contact us to learn more about portal solutions and how it could help you
• Take a test drive of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for education