I read in http://www.case.edu/its/publication/documents/CaseITSNews-May06.pdf that "a new Help Desk website" will "go live in July". It claims to be "user-friendly" (but I'll believe that only when I see it).

Distressingly, it is stated that the new site will be accessible "only through the MyCase portal". Why? Why? Why?

On the one hand I think this is good, because I am totally fed up with the Zope/Plone experience. I live for the day that the EECS website is totally divorced from it, although that may not happen in my lifetime.

So when MyCase is not working, you cannot go to a simple web page like the current help.case.edu to see that a problem exists?

I find that to be inflexible. You are forcing people to go through a specific portal in order to access the Help Desk web site. It should be accessible through the ITS home page, EECS site (if they ever do that), start.case.edu, and so on.

A few months back, I was asked to preview the new site. It IS integrated into the MyCase portal. However, it is just a web site that is screen-scraped from a Tomcat server running somewhere on campus. It took me about 20 seconds to find the URL and load it separately.

The interface is clunky to say the least. Things open in new windows everywhere. It is not very intuitive. I guess it fits right in with the MyCase portal in terms of usability.

I started to write a review of the new service, but got side-tracked. I did send a lengthy opinion e-mail to the people responsible. Unfortunately, I never got so much as a quick "thank you for your comments." The people at Case who did take notice of my comments and were in a position to do something about them are no longer with the university.

After checking my.case.edu again today, it seems nothing has changed since I tested it a few months back. Oh well.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit was 2006:06:04:15:54:21 by Gregory Szorc.

It looks like help.case.edu isn't the only thing getting replaced by a portal-only solution.

Matthew Heimbach:

It looks like help.case.edu isn't the only thing getting replaced by a portal-only solution.

I can't wait for them to stop calling it a portal. If it is just like the Help Desk "portlet" (which takes up the full browser width and is really another website proxied into the portal), I am going to go ape. If it is using an API to interface with the financial system, please, post details on how to use the API. It would be really cool if the USG Finance System could integrate directly with the university's systems...

Good, I hate that damn QuickPay website.

I'm using a development build of Firefox, and it seems they recently disabled SSLv2 support in the trunk because it's old and sort of insecure and not widely used. Guess what. I can't access my.case.edu any more... Fantastic.

--Brandon

I just realized the portal looks great in Lynx! It is much more navigatable in ASCII. Check it out: