To: The Wellesley College Community
From: Tara Murphy, Vice President of Communications, Public Affairs, and Global Engagement; and Ravi Ravishanker, Chief Information Officer and Associate Provost
Re: Launch of Wellesley’s new intranet
Date: May 13, 2024
We’re pleased to share that we have launched the College’s new intranet, which will make it easier for you to find information and complete tasks and business to support the important work you all do at Wellesley. The design reflects the research and conversations our design partner, Fastspot, conducted with our campus community. You can access the intranet using your Wellesley login at intranet.wellesley.edu.
What you will see today is Phase 1 of this significant undertaking. We are building the intranet in stages to ensure that we can respond to community feedback as we move forward. You can send comments and suggestions to websiteredesign@wellesley.edu.
The features available in Phase 1 include:
- Landing pages and “central resources” subpages, with links that address the distinct needs of students, faculty, and staff. These links are a work in progress. We will work with key administrative offices to finalize what they would like included in this area. This blog post describes our approach in more detail.
- A prominent “How Do I …” section, with links to frequently-accessed or time-sensitive tasks.
- A “Community Notes” section highlighting exciting news from community members.
- A comprehensive listing of events open to the community.
- Listings with links to all academic and administrative departments (accessible through the menu).
- A campuswide directory.
Because this is just the first stage of what will soon be a comprehensive new intranet, many links will still connect you to the Drupal site at www1.wellesley.edu. Over the summer, we will be moving the intranet forward in two phases, while making some minor modifications along the way:
Phase 2 (May-June): We are working with an initial group of academic and administrative departments to build examples of department sites. We will share those pages in early June and ask for your feedback. These examples will offer design and content possibilities for what other departments might look like.
Phase 3 (June-August): We will work with the remaining departments to migrate their content. Our hope is to have the complete intranet finished by mid to late August.
PLEASE NOTE! We have not yet rolled out the search function on the intranet, so if you need to conduct a search we recommend that you first check out this blog post on how to navigate the websites during the transition period. Once we have the full intranet, you will be able to use the internal site search. Please subscribe to the blog to get future updates on the website redesign project.
We have also developed a draft web governance policy that is designed to create a governance process for the College’s external website, the intranet, as well as other content that is supported by the College, or is faculty- or staff-generated. This draft policy has been shared with the Website Governance Committee and the Advisory Committee on Library Technology Policy, and is now posted on the website redesign blog for community comment. We plan to review comments received until August 15 with those committees, as well as academic chairs and program directors, and hope to finalize in the fall.
Thank you for your patience, and we look forward to hearing your feedback as we roll out the new intranet.
