Recently I listened in on a webinar (a WebEx presentation + conference call) given by RedDot and UNICON on how they integrated content management (provided by RedDot) with a portal (Academus, provided by UNICON). Besides being a sales pitch for the two products (Why buy one when you could get two at twice the cost?) there was some interesting commentary from UNICON about portals and how they can be used to get information to specific groups of people.
Everyone wants to target specific groups people in this age of information overload and that’s fine. I think the two main issues are 1) is your message worth it to the target and 2) can you define your target group. There are many other issues, obviously, but these are the main ones I want to focus on.
For the first issue it really comes down to does the message have to be pushed to the target or can that information be found when needed. Yes, that opens up a can of IA worms, but that’s for another post. To me this means “stuff” that’s out of the ordinary, like system downtimes and important dates that have been changed.
The second issue is also tricky. Lets say you want to target 4th year students. What is a 4th year student? The answer is not as obvious as it may seem. Is it a student that has been at Chico for 4 years? Do they have a certain number of units? What about transfer students? What about continuing education students? Even after you’ve answered all the questions that define your group, do you have the answers in place where they can be queried by the applications that will deliver information to your group? “Well, this part is in LDAP, but this part is in the data warehouse, and this last part is in a file cabinet.” It looks like you’ve got some work to do…