In principle, a university intranet portal is deployed to make the communication between the management, the teaching faculty, and the students easy. But many portals seem to objectively fail to meet this simple requirement. It is more often the case that the management and the faculty might think that this a useful tool, the students see it as more of a novelty procedure that they feel forced to be a part of. Ideally, it should balance the needs of the university and the students.
The simple reason why they don’t use the intranet portal, in most cases, is because they don’t find it engaging or as useful as the regular social media networks they frequent. Even a 40 year old technology like email has evolved so much that there is no need for them to use another internet tool. One less password for them to remember, one less website they need to visit. To convince them to use the tool, the portal must simply offer unique services, be extremely user friendly, and have other essential features in order for the students to take it seriously.
Here are a few important must-have features in a university portal:
The ability to collaborate:
The portal’s main goal should to be to provide an exceptional collaborative ability between and for the students and faculty. This functionality should be objectively better than other tools at the user’s disposal. Portals’ built using technologies like Microsoft SharePoint provide functionalities like Cloud document storage, synchronize with multiple devices, online and offline availability, and have a useful search tool. These features gives the users the ability to find, edit, or share academic/policy materials with ease and all in one place; thus giving an incentive for the users to use the portal.
A document sharing and management system
The portal’s ability to manage thousands of documents is an absolute crucial necessity for the tool to exist at all. Students and faculty must be able to share documents coupled with the ability to give permissions for someone else to edit or just view the document. When multiple people are using, editing the document, everyone must have the ability know who made what changes.
Mobile friendly
The need to explain the importance of mobility is a moot point. The system, with all the features, must be available on mobile. This supercharges the portal’s objective of creating a functional information sharing system.
Interactive tour to let people know about the features
To make sure the students and faculty know all the available features in the portal, an interactive tutorial that takes them through the different functionalities available is necessary. There is always a possibility of even technically proficient users to overlook some features available in the tool.
To know more about why SharePoint is the perfect tool to build such an intranet portal, please click here. If you found the article helpful, please share and/or leave a comment.
