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?