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Late Sunday evening, Information Technology Services and Marketing Communications, launched a large upgrade to the Polaris portal. This newest release of Polaris brings about a huge number of changes and improvements - especially on the portal's dashboard, the creation of posts, and mobile accessibility. The search tool is vastly more functional, and is now the quickest way to find what you need.

Posts

A new application, Polaris Posts, has been created to give faculty and staff the ability to add, update, and manage content within Polaris. This new content will now be available within search and on a new Polaris dashboard tab, called Posts.

The Browse tab has been removed, and its content has been divided between Launchpad systems and Posts. This content can be quickly found via search.

The intention of this project is to move faculty and staff focused content off of the main website () and onto the Polaris portal. This will allow the main website to better serve its primary audience of prospective students. Migration of content from the website to the portal will happen over time. Marketing and communications will be working with each department on campus over the next 6-8 months to determine a plan for their information.

Posts are very easy to create and consist of a title, body copy, image and document attachments, and tags. Tags will be the method of organizing related content together. Clicking on tag within a post will show you all posts that use that tag, so, for example, you could see all human resources content or all faculty content.

Search should be the primary way that you find content within Polaris, but posted content can also be found under the Posts tab. On this tab you’ll be able to see a selection of posts, which can be sorted by most recent, popular (most popular of all time), or trending (popular right now). The most common tags in these groups are also shown, and can be clicked to show all posts using that tag.

All posts will display the date it was last updated and all relevant author information, including who owns the post (typically the person who created it), the person who made the last update, and any additional contributors. Content providers will be incentivized to write and maintain better content, since their names will be on it.

Since the content within Polaris will be crowdsourced, it will be up to you to keep it accurate and up-to-date. If you notice a post that is unclear, inaccurate, no longer relevant, or inappropriate you may click on the Request a Change button in the post and send a message to the owner.

Access to this system is currently limited to a small number of people at the moment as we stress the system and build a model for how people should be adding content. We will send further announcements when we roll out the system to a larger number of people.

Search

Search is much more powerful; the field is focused automatically when a page is loaded, so you can immediately start typing to find many types of information: current news, upcoming and past events, Launchpad systems, directory information for both people and departments, and, lastly, Posts, which can be found by title, body, or associated tags.

Design

The portal's graphic design was improved across the board using Google’s material design guidelines. Colors now more closely follow the Salem State motif, and important sections of the page are now distinguished with layers and shadows. A large change is the site-wide header: it has been redesigned to use its space efficiently on any size screen, and the search box has been moved here to make the feature available everywhere.

Another site-wide change is the side navigation within individual Launchpad systems. On narrow screens – such as tablets or mobile devices – this navigation “slides” off the left side of the screen, and generally operates like native apps as found in iOS and Android.

Many pages, such as the existing news and events pages have been updated to work better on mobile devices, and details are more clearly shown by more wisely using the available screen space.

Future Updates

We will be continuously rolling out improvements to the Polaris portal. Stay up to date of these changes right here via the Polaris news section.

We greatly appreciate all feedback and suggestions, which can be sent to the ITS help desk at it-helpdesk@salemstate.edu or call x2036.

Website Redesign and Portal Development Project Team