Page 10 - TIM_03-02-23

Upgraded District Portal Soon To Deploy • Students, employees and charter school employees
In the February 2022 edition of TIME, we told you
about plans to upgrade the District Portal for students
and employees. The updated Portal for all students,
employees and charter school employees will go live
on March 22. It will remain the primary point-of-entry
to access student and employee web-based software
applications, while providing the same access and
experience even when logging in from
home.
Employees: Feel free to try out the
upgraded portal by clicking on the
Sneak Peek tile in your current portal.
3 Reasons for the Change
1. In fall 2021, our CIO directed us
to start a project to put our District
Portal in the cloud to increase
its availability and minimize the
chances of portal downtime.
2. Our existing District Portal is
facing an end-of-life. The company
that owned it was bought out by
another company, who is phasing it out in favor of
their portal product called RapidIdentity.
3. District Strategic Plan initiative B.2a has a directive
to “Create a tailored hub to help students and
families navigate District processes to achieve their
educational goals.” The RapidIdentity portal will be
our primary tool to accomplish that initiative via a new
parent portal. We cannot have a parent portal with our
current portal product.
RapidIdentity Portal Benefits
Cloud-Based: It is cloud-based, so it will remain
available to students and employees even during internal
technical outages and planned Data Center shutdowns. A
cloud-based portal also means the vendor is responsible
for disaster recovery and business continuity.
Personas: It allows for different “Personas”, which
means the user interface and accompanying tiles can be
different for different sets of users.
will be our initial set of available Personas. Each of those
groups will see something different and unique to that
group.
• In the future, we can create other Personas such as
“All 8th Graders ” or “All Central Region Students ” or “All
Finance Division Employees ”.
Parent Portal: Parents can be
added to the portal with their own
username/password and Persona
and without creating/maintaining
Active Directory accounts for each
parent.
User Control: Users have more
control over the look and feel of
their portal. They have control over
the density, tile size, and mode
(dark/light) settings. They also have
the ability to mark one or more
tiles as “Favorites”, ensuring it will
prominently display on their portal
home screen.
Mobile Friendly: The RapidIdentity portal works better
on mobile devices.
Task for Some Users
Some current portal users have one or more “My Tiles”
where they created their own tile and linked it to an
external website. We have requested that the vendor
incorporate My Tiles-type functionality into their product.
When it becomes available, we will update users. In the
meantime, those users will be encouraged to convert
those links to browser bookmarks as a workaround.
As a reminder, the Chrome browser ‘home-page’ of
computers within the District network will continue to
default to the Portal login page. To access the Portal from
home, students and employees may go to the District
website and click “SIGN IN” at the top right. To log into
the Portal, students and employees must use their District
network username and password.