Web Portals Delayed Six Weeks

Students will have to wait up to six more weeks until their Harvard-provided door to the Internet is unlocked.

Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services (HASCS) promised last spring that it would provide students with their own customizable Web "portal" pages with information pertinent to their lives at Harvard by the beginning of this school year.

But because of problems in assembling information and maximizing speed, the portal pages will not be complete until sometime between Thanksgiving and New Year's, according to Franklin M. Steen, director of Faculty of Arts and Sciences Computer Services.

"As with many other projects, things have gone a bit more slowly than we expected with the portals," wrote Paul C. Martin, dean for research and information technology, in an e-mail message.

Organizers of the initiative, known as the Portal Project, plan to include a variety of features on the Web pages. Some, such as links to Web sites for a student's concentration or courses, will be permanent. Others, including weather, sports scores and headlines from The Crimson, will be customizable.

Steen said the project has been delayed because it is dependent on data from other sources. For example, links to each student's courses could not be added until the Registrar's Office supplied that information.

Another reason for the project's delay is that the system still operates slowly, Steen said.

The project is currently being moved from a development machine to a production machine. When this process is over, the project's organizers will test the speed again. If it runs quickly enough, they will then publicize the pages for use by students.

HASCS will then ask students for feedback and adjust the portal pages as needed.

"Right now, [the running time] is too slow to make any kind of announcement," Steen said.

Preliminary versions of the portal pages for students and faculty, as well as sample pages, are already on the Internet at http://my.harvard.edu.

The pages include a customizable list of student group events and a calendar listing campus events. In constructing the calendar, HASCS bought a package that included the source code, so that it could specially configure it according to the needs of the project.

Steen warned that although the portal pages function, they are very slow and may not save any changes made to them because the code is still changing--and more hits to the site will further slow the pages.

HASCS will not have the capacity for all students to look at their pages until the coding is moved to the production machine, he said.