For more than 20 years, Engineering has hosted dozens of portals, including my.las, my.oar, and my.techservices that supported key university applications. Across all three University of Illinois campuses, this grew to nearly 70 separate portals, each requiring its own maintenance and support.
We are about to enter a new phase, together. The Office of the CIO and Engineering IT are partnering to unify those portals under a single destination: my.illinois.edu.
This consolidation is a concrete example of Illinois’ Boldly IT at work—specifically Strategy 1.2: Develop a formal collaborative structure for IT.
“Unifying these across all units makes the single portal potentially visible to every single user on campus,” said Jim Hurst, Chief Administrative Officer at the Office of the CIO. “Removing the specific unit branding and specific portal-locked applications treats all units as part of one larger ecosystem. There has been a single provider of these apps for many years, but this unifying change visually represents us acting more as one IT unit in a coordinated way.”
One address, one experience
Faculty, staff, and students will now have one place to go, regardless of which unit they work in or which applications they need. Access is controlled at the user level—you’ll only see what you have rights to, no matter which portal you log into. This will be a unified experience for those using the portals and those managing them.
“When we have updates…we would only have to apply them to one portal, instead of 70,” said Brad Butler, Associate Director of Application Development, Data Analytics, and Project Management Office at Engineering IT. “We are hoping to provide a more consistent user experience and common destination for accessing our applications. We will no longer have to explain ‘go to a specific portal to submit something’ — they can simply go to one place.”
Engineering IT has owned and operated the my.___ portals for over two decades. What began as a framework built by Josh Potts in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department grew as developers from across Engineering joined in, each building applications designed for anyone to use.
“We all have a common goal, to help people do their jobs more efficiently and collaboratively,” said Butler. “We write our applications so that anyone can use them and over time, through word of mouth and personalized service, we grew and evolved to what we are today.”
More than 100 applications are available through the portals, with 43 currently live at my.illinois.edu and more being added over time. Eight are fully funded by the Provost’s office and approved for all units campuswide—TimeTracker, Vacation/Sick Leave, Chart of Accounts, Inventory, Appointments, Gradapps, Gradrecs, and UGradrecs.
The transition
The portal itself will remain the same and is not retiring; the domain is what will change. The portal itself will remain the same and is not retiring; the domain is what will change.
“We won’t move anyone, they can simply choose between the two for now. We will notify all users over time if we decide to shut down an existing portal, but even if we were to do that, we would redirect the old portals to the new my.illinois,” said Butler.
“The idea of consolidating to this one name has been proposed a few times over the years,” said Hurst. “But only now under this new [Boldly IT] strategic plan have both sides embraced that.”
If you have questions or feedback about the move to my.Illinois, you can visit my.illinois.edu/apptrack and chat with the chatbot or send an email to engrit-apps@illinois.edu.