The MyPack Portal is being upgraded.  The new features and benefits will be available Nov. 21.  

The Office of Information Technology is in charge of this upgrade.  Within the next two years, the entire MyPack Portal will be reformatted.

Jack Foster, enterprise portal administrator of OIT, said that after the upgrade, the navigation in the portal would change significantly. 

“One of the key features of the upgrade will be the new breadcrumb style design for navigation which will give more flexibility to users. The MyPack will be standardized to meet the branding of N.C. State,” Foster said.

Connie Reitfort, director of enterprise application services of OIT, said the upgrade from version 8.9 to 9.1 will be done initially for the portal only.

“Whenever the PeopleSoft Solutions and Oracle upgrade their products, we download it and make the changes in our system. The 8.9 – 9.1 upgrade will be done to the portal initially and in the next two years, upgrades will be made to the sys, enterprise and financial portals,” Reitfort said.

According to Foster, users will not be without help when the new page is unveiled. 

“There will be some tutorials and help probably on the login page about how to use the new user interface for navigation. The upgrading process will take place on a weekend, during which the portal will be unavailable,” Foster said.

Sonika Rawal, a doctoral student in architecture, said having tutorials in login page will definitely help.

“Including tutorials will definitely help; especially to the international students who may not be used to such web based resources. Also, branding the Portal to NC State standards will in a way help it to have an edge over the other similar Portals of other universities,” Sonika said.

Orginially, the upgrade was planned for October, but it has been postponed to mid-November, according to Foster.

“The upgrade was initially scheduled in October, but now it has been shifted to mid-November, precisely Nov. 21st of this year,” Foster said.  “There will be a few hours of down-time during the Sunday morning maintenance window and we’ll send out more details on that as we get closer.”

Marc Hoit, vice chancellor of Office of Information Technology, said only the portal system is being upgraded right now.

“In November, we are upgrading the Portal system to version 9.1. The first step after will be upgrading individual financial and HR resource systems, probably in next two years. The student resource system will have an individual upgrade after that,” Hoit said.

According to Hoit, each setup will have its own problems.

“Some senior students had issues with the current system as previously, we had older version of the system which they preferred. On the other hand, the students enrolled after the current portal was deployed, had no such issues. There are still minor changes related to student services that we are working on,” Hoit said.

The MyPack Portal is a one-stop source for information and resources from the NC State community. Inside you will find faculty, staff, student and parent resources, including academic, financial and human resources information, as well as many other campus services. 

It went live for student use in September 2008. Earlier in 2006, the portal was started for the administrative people for financial and HR resources. The last upgrade for the MyPack Portal was in fact the inception of the portal for students in September 2008, according to Foster and Reitfort.

Sagar Natekar, a graduate student in computer science, said the new look portal will give more feeling of being a part of NC State.

“The new N.C. State style branding of MyPack Portal will give a feeling of being part of the N.C. State family,” Natekar said.