CLAC: Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges NEWS 12 28 2003 105624 Page 2
We met with all academic departments that administer servers to assure that they would
be able to continue to provide necessary services to off-campus audiences. This policy is
an extension of an existing practice for the servers we already manage.
The campus portal continues to be a critical piece of our strategy to provide
authenticated, personalized access to information starting with prospective students and
continuing with alumni. We just completed the transition of our alumni community from
an outsourced arrangement to one that uses our own portal, thereby providing additional
services to alumni in a manner consistent with our entire Web effort, while saving $$$$.
An additional interesting effort is our use of the portal and a coordinated series of
mailings and Web activities to help new students and their parents transition to Hamilton
over the summer. In addition, integrating email, Blackboard, and other information
channels has increasingly made the portal a key element of the academic program.
Finally, a special thanks to everyone I met with in my travels around the country last year
when I visited 28 CLAC/ U.S. News top 25 schools. (A summary of the trip will appear
in the January/February Educause Review.) There isn't a week that goes by that I don't
talk about something I saw at these institutions. We are implementing some of these ideas
at Hamilton this year, such as the perimeter firewall policy I mentioned above. Your
institutions are great places that can never be fully appreciated by 18 22 year olds.
That's I guess why we tend to have such strong support from alumni absence, indeed,
makes the heart grow fonder.
