MACCESS - Your new central hub for McMaster services!
New for you –
MACCESS (
maccess.mcmaster.ca) is a portal designed for students with the help of students. You’ll find it on-line and it’s designed to provide all major services (and some not so major) in one place. Sign on once and you’re in – you don’t have to sign in again for access to MUGSI, personal timetables, e-mail, grades and WebCT. You also get features like portable bookmarks, and a customizable RSS feed to keep you up to date. And, there will be more coming to MACCESS in the future.
Students contributed in a huge way to the development of the portal. In the summer of 2005 we did a survey of what you thought was important and over 6,000 students responded. We also held focus groups to get more information on how students wanted to use the portal. In the fall of 2006 we interviewed students in MUSC for feedback on the best way to organize the content in tabs. In 2007 we asked students to name the portal and MACCESS was selected as the most popular choice. With all of that input we hope you will find the portal useful and simple to navigate.
We want to encourage regular feedback on the portal so we have added a discussion forum with a topic for feedback and comments. Please use it to tell us what you think.
And, as a special incentive to MacInsiders readers,
I will be giving away two $25 gift certificates to Titles. How do you get one? I will make two postings on the Portal discussion forum at random times over the next two days (and not just in office hours). The first person to reply to each posting will receive one of the certificates. There will be other chances later but MacInsiders get advance notice of these two.
Finally, I want to give special thanks to the folks in Student Affairs and the Registrar's Office who sponsored the project, and to the Technology Fund, Refining Directions and student fees who covered the costs. And a special shout out to all of the students who gave input, offered comments, participated in surveys, focus groups, user testing and especially to Chad who worked on the project for a summer.
Check out the preview here and check out MACCESS at
maccess.mcmaster.ca
John Alley, PMP
Director Project Management Office
We really wanted to support Safari but the tool we are using doesn't make that easy at all. Alyssabriere, web traffic analysis shows that you are in a select minority that use Safari. We opted for the standards-compliant browsers. If we get significant feedback on Safari compatibility we can try again - or we could put a priority on making it useable on cell-phones and PDAs. Please add to the Comments and Feedback forum on MACCESS and we will have info to guide our next priorities.
