FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Keeping track of news, campus events, daily activities, e-mail messages and even the weather is now easier at the University of Arkansas. A personal web portal system has been launched and is now available to students, faculty and staff.

What is a personal web portal? My.uark.edu integrates many of existing web-based services onto one site. Services such as e-mail, calendars, disk storage, class schedules, and bookmarked hyper-links are accessible on one convenient source.

"It also a way for us to address the needs of our increasingly nomadic customers," said James McCartney, who is managing the web portal site. "By keeping a personalized portal desktop image on our central server, we can maintain the same setup across multiple computers."

The Web Portal will be maintained by University IT Services with content assistance by University Relations. The system was purchased last fall for $150,000, which includes the software, hardware and salaries. Maintenance of the system is $11,000 yearly.

Sign-on is simple: just go to http://my.uark.edu/ and select either the student or faculty/staff portal then log on with your UARK ID and your UARK.EDU PASSWORD (these are the ID and passwords used for campus e-mail.) From this location you will be directed to your personal web portal page complete with your university identification photo, which is optional and can be turned off with a simple click of the mouse.

Amenities of the portal.

My Webmail — access to your webmail account and checks for recent mail
My Comp Drive — offers HTML and Java Applet access to COMP storage space
Calendar — access to your calendar server account
Daily Headlines — University Relations daily University news services
My Weather — shows Fayetteville weather and links to outside weather sites
My Search — search the web or University network using popular search engines
My Schedule — Class scheduling is available now, other scheduling capabilities are planned
Users can customize their portals with a set of user controls that will change content and layout.

"Portals are coming on strong this year, and we are among the first of the universities in the country to offer this service," McCartney said. "We certainly think this will be a service that the campus community will find very useful and convenient, particularly as we continue to improve and add to the amenities the portal provides."