Tyler the Tech Guy

myOxy, the new web portal for Occidental students (my.oxy.edu), is really cool and convenient, but only if you take the time to dig though menus a little and customize. As a web portal, the goal of myOxy is to take the web content students (or faculty or staff) access the most frequently, and to put it all in a place that is easy, intuitive and customizable.

That last word, "customizable", is the most important part, because without it, myOxy would just be a site that aggregates links from the Oxy site (oxy.edu). In fact, when you log in, you initially get the impression that that's what it is.

You are first greeted by a welcome page, which has a few neat touches like the Marketplace menu, Oxy events and L.A. weather. What should really catch your eye, though, are two sets of buttons- a row of "tabs" in the upper left, and a series of large icons on the top right.

The icons all take you to external sites that require a login, such as Webmail, Moodle or the library Web site. What is cool is that, once you've logged in to myOxy, clicking any of these links will not require you to sign in again. While this can be convenient, you are really only saving time if you were planning to open more than one of these sites at once, say Webmail and Moodle, so you do not have to log in two separate times. Otherwise, going to myOxy first seems like an unnecessary click, when you could just go directly to Webmail and login there.

What is even more frustrating about this is that myOxy seems to time you out and require you to log in again after a relatively short period which prevents you from keeping myOxy open and using it to launch those sites. This might be my single biggest issue with myOxy - why would you use it to access sites that require a login when myOxy will log you out more quickly then the sites themselves will?

The tabs on the upper left are where a lot of the useful information from the Oxy site is collected. The tabs are "Welcome," "Directories and Search," "Academics," "Student Services" and "Oxy Community", and they group a lot of links and information together that would otherwise be scattered across the Oxy site. It is certainly convenient to have all the directories (campus, student and printable), together in the same place, especially when that is grouped with department lists and department chairs.

It is also really helpful to have boxes with links to all sites that group together. For instance, the "For Students" box includes links to pages for student government and student business sites, such as the ones for the Senate, the Bengal Bus, or, I don't know, The Occidental Weekly (oxyweekly.com).

As nice as it is to have all of these links available in one place, they still all do just link to the outside page, or the sub-site on the Oxy.edu page. myOxy is not giving students any new content at first glance, just links to where the content already existed.

However, as I said earlier, it is customization that really sets web portals apart, and myOxy is certainly very easy to configure, even if the options to do so are a little hidden. The button you need to click is a small link in the upper left-hand corner called "content layout".

From there, you discover the true extent to which you can change the site - you can add or remove any of the boxes, add or remove tabs, change the number of columns on any given page, and reorder things however you wish. For instance, one of the first things that I did was to take the Google search box (which is for both Oxy.edu and the web) and put it on the upper right-hand side of my main page (it is by default in the "Directories and Search" tab), so that I could search for something quickly.

Perhaps the most important thing I discovered though, is that when you click on the button to add a new box to a tab, there are some options that did not appear at all under any tab up to this point. There is a box called "e-mail feed", which shows your most recent e-mail messages (which is some nice integration between Webmail and myOxy). Another example is a box called "site map", which gives you quick links to all the categories under all of your tabs. And, of course, you can add boxes for things like "word of the day" (today's is "capitulate"), and "motivational quote of the day" (today's is from Harrison Ford).

What all this means is that there are many options to make myOxy as personalized to you as you want to make it. If you take the time to tweak it, you really can set myOxy up in a way that will allow you to access information or find what you are looking for really quickly.

myOxy is a great start, and I am excited to see where it will go as features are added and the site tailors itself more to each individual and their role on campus. The web portal is already very useful, and I urge students to take advantage of it, but it also has a lot of potential to truly become an indispensable resource in and of itself (as opposed to aggregating outside resources). It is possible that it could some day become one of those things that causes students to wonder, "How did we do without this?"

For more information , see "myOxy Web Portal Enhances School Website" in the News section of this issue.