User-Friendly Web Portal Helps Connect the Value for Members of the Missouri Research and Education Network

While our member institutions were busy serving their communities in academia and the public sector, MOREnet continued to improve its user portal, with the goal of helping members visualize the value of their participation in the MOREnet consortium.

Although for several years, we’ve had a self-service portal for members to monitor fees and bandwidth usage, we’ve made a concentrated effort over the last 12 months to enhance the information available making it even more valuable for our members. Our primary goal was to improve the user experience of the portal to draw more users and broaden the local understanding of MOREnet service availability, usage and relevance for their institution. The secondary goal was to show a more complete story of the value they receive from the services they subscribe to, including our Member Service Package, which includes a bundling of our most popular and essential technical services. We also populate the portal with tools that highlight the competency of the broadband connection into our local research and education network. Since our connectivity is unlike what most providers deliver, we want our members to see the difference and understand what sets it apart.

Members connected to our network, can see their current circuit capacity, including both ordered and provisioned bandwidth, the expiration date of the circuit, and the hostname as well as the interface. Users can review IP addresses assigned to their organization. New graphics show utilization as well as maximum utilization over the most recent 24-hour period to help members understand if capacity meets demand. There is also an option to drill down with Netflow reporting to better understand traffic patterns for analysis and planning future bandwidth needs. Finally, members can set up alerts for their circuits.

MOREnet’s Membership Service Package includes online resources such as EBSCO, EBSCO eBooks, HeritageQuest and LearningExpress. In MyMOREnet, our members-only portal, members can see monthly usage statistics including searches and full-text downloads. In the Document section, we share downloadable documents that may be of interest to members. And under the Service Utilization drop down menu, members can see the professional development that faculty and staff from their organization have attended through MOREnet-offered training workshops, conferences or online training.

In the Subscriptions section, all members are able to see all active service subscriptions which provides a real-time fee estimate based on current service rates. To assist with budget planning, members have the ability to print a PDF of their current subscriptions and the associated fees to share and reference as needed. Members can create or view a help desk case in real time; the table shows users the status of each case (open or closed) as well as a quick case description and its identification number. Administrators are now able to manage their contacts in MyMOREnet. This is an easy way to designate who MOREnet staff should contact for particular areas–billing, technical issues, E-rate, online resources or cyber security.

We are pleased with the positive comments we have received on this new interface for MyMOREnet. This new platform gives us greater flexibility to continue to enhance the experience for users and expand the adoption and value of this tool.