myUSF: University of South Florida Web Portal

With the intent of unifying diverse online campus systems into one fully integrated platform that incorporated the university's pre-existing administrative systems, specifically SCT® Banner^TM, the University of South Florida used the community portal features in the Blackboard platform to create an academic environment that links students, faculty, and staff to the courses, organizations, and Web-based services that are relevant to their academic lives.

Initially implemented in Spring 2002 on Blackboard 5.5 without any fail-over capability, the myUSF Portal is currently deployed using redundant hardware and monitoring software to ensure a near-fault-tolerant environment, and with the enhanced performance provided by the load balancing in Blackboard Release 6.

	https://my.usf.edu

This collection of online services provided via the web single sign-on portal at https://my.usf.edu, include automatic electronic course space for every section of every class (a process which involves mapping more than 40,000 students and their instructors into 7,000 classes each semester), customized distribution of licensed software (based on the individual's Institutional Role), real-time information with respect to available seats in our Open Use Computer Labs, access to email, etc.

In addition to providing support for conventional instruction, the myUSF portal provides electronic services to support communities such as formal academic structures of departments and colleges, student services and informal study and research groups.