Portal Administration Redux

A big piece of the new sprint we started this week includes a revival or restoration, if you will, of simplicity to portal administration. These changes will guide new portal administrators through the processes necessary for portal setup in clearly defined steps.

As you may know, the current portal administration main landing page is very informative and even exhaustive in nature, but also a quite a long list. It isn’t the easiest to comprehend for new portal administrators. It looks like this:

Premium Services Portal

The portal tab is the place where administrators configure and set up their portal. This is the where you can configure various general portal settings like logos and course categories, authorize users and authors, and review your portal account financial information. You may use the following links to navigate directly to these areas of portal administration:

Portal Settings

Your portal settings are used to control general changes to your portal, such as logos, course categories, and portal messages.

Course Categories

Your portal maintains its own list of categories for the course catalog. You may maintain them by adding, removing, and renaming them here.

Customize My Portal

This utility allows you to select your portal's logo, which appears at the top of every portal page. You may also upload a print-quality logo for use on course completion certificates.

Portal Messages

Portal messages are free-form messages that you want to display to your logged in portal users.

Users

The users section allows you to manage portal users, authors, and user groups.

Portal Users

This tool manages your existing users, allows you to process pending registrations, and sends invitations to new users.

Authors

This section allows you to grant authoring permissions to your users.

User Groups

This area helps you organize your users into groups. Access to course categories is controlled by user groups.

Administrators

Pick the users that you want to be Administrators with this utility. This will give these users the same permissions for administering the portal that you have. Generally you will not need to add any other administrators to your portal.

Portal Account

Your portal account section helps you manage your purchases and payment history.

Package History

View your package purchase history in this section. Your package details may also be reviewed here.

Payment Information

Update your stored payment information here. Be sure to keep your payment data up-to-date, especially near your renewal date.

Payment History

Use this utility to view payment status and history for the portal.

Quite the long list!



Well, here is a sneak peak at the new portal dashboard, which will take the place of this list:

Pretty nice, huh? I think this new design provides simplicity, step sequencing instructions, grouping of steps, and highlighting of important steps, all without loosing functionality. You cannot see it here, but we also show longer descriptions for each activity when the cursor hovers over a link.



As always, I welcome your comments.



Thomas Klassen