Calling all beta testers. Information Technology Services has taken the covers off the first iteration of MyCWRU and they want feedback.

"Initial feedback has been very positive," said ITS Portal Director Ronald Ryan. "We've run a series of student, staff and faculty focus groups, and we'll be doing many more in the next several weeks."

MyCWRU is a personalizable, customizable, individual Web-based desktop environment that lets each member of the Case Western Reserve University community develop their personal view of CWRU.

"Some folks have chosen to place their entire lives on their MyCWRU. Other users have kept it pretty simple with news, mail and calendar," Ryan said. "The idea is that you should be able to take ownership of all of the electronic resources that are currently dispersed and not easily accessible. MyCWRU gives you a single starting point for all things that matter to you."

Jeff Gumpf, Senior Technology Architect for CWRU noted that the open beta environment exhibits many advanced services that community users have long sought.

"There is single authentication. This means you login once and permissions are distributed to those services that you've brought into your portal view," Gumpf said. "This also means you have to be careful to logout when you're finished."

In addition, MyCWRU has a powerful workflow logic, known as Campus Athena, that the University is deploying.

"Basically, we are embedding the logic of a student's life and interaction with the University and trying to let the technology take care of basic relational elements," Gumpf said.

For example, a student who registers for a course will find a Blackboard class automatically added with separate links to course-related announcements that can be added to his or her MyCWRU. In addition, students automatically will be added to course organizations like electronic discussion lists. The student's electronic calendar also will be populated with the times the class meets.

According to Ryan, this is just the beginning of the services supported by MyCWRU.

"In our next release we will have integrated services for instant messaging, enhanced streaming video, modifiable tabs, role-based logins, a distributed development environment and about 101 features that have already been identified," he said.

MyCWRU has a built-in feedback button, and Ryan is interested in user input.

"We can't guarantee instant support for requested features, but we are committed to user feedback and assembling features for version 2.0 and beyond," he said.

Additional to the portal framework itself, some of the features faculty, staff and students can add to their own MyCWRU include: Blackboard announcements, courses and organizations; CWRU events, headlines and news; CWRU views, or images of CWRU and the surrounding community; a portable bookmark list; most recent report card grades; library check-out record; Live@CWRU streaming video; MSN Money stock ticker; MyCWRU poll; network services announcements on the status of the campus network; news in various categories; a to-do list, daily appointments and calendar; search using a number of popular search engines; what's showing at the Film Society; today in history; weather; Web mail; and a word of the day.

To try out MyCWRU, go to http://my.cwru.edu.