It was a good year for the portal. In general, people used it exactly as we intended. They logged in, they got to WebCT, e-mail, and PeopleSoft without having to login again. In general, the portal work as a portal. Hooray, Portal!
Can you spot the summer months? I knew you could! So, some obvious observations:
- Fall semester starts off with a bang. People tend to login in more than once a day during that period. This makes sense because there is a lot of schedule checking, adding, dropping, and grabbing of WebCT information.
- Summer is slow. People rarely login more than once a day.
- Spring break is a lot like summer, only shorter and probably not as warm.
So, what is the difference between logins and unique users? That’s an excellent question. Logins count all the times people login to the portal. If you login 3 times in one day, we count them all. To get a unique user count, we ignore how many times a person would login in a day and just count them once. This accounts for the discrepancy in our line plots. (*Note:* For the uportal geeks out there, we’re not counting guest sessions.)