Pros and Cons for Boulder Campus unified student web services

Pros

• One stop shopping
• Consistent presentation; no ‘web shanty town’ and less fractured services
• Adherence to security standards
• Resources of the leading IT provider for the Boulder Campus brought to bear on development and support
• Professional development experience
• System monitoring and support from one place
• Brand recognition
• Redundant and high availability hardware infrastructure
• Straightforward integration with core IT services (email, course tools, etc.)
• Student centric; access to resources without requiring an understanding of the administrative structure of the University

Cons

• Inflexible
• Too many restrictions
• Development cycle too long
• Inability to control priority
• Central support services not responsive
• Unable to establish separate, unique web ‘brand’
• Another layer of complexity and bureaucracy
• Not all the information available from a department’s web site can be incorporated in a unified service; students will still need to come to our site.
• Diseconomy of scale – why can’t we use MS Word, MS Access and an insecure web server?