SloanSpace Primer for Users
What is SloanSpace?
SloanSpace is a portal community and course management
system for the MIT Sloan School of Management.
During the Spring of 2001, it is open to all courses and community
groups are being piloted.
Who to Contact
Sloan Technology Services administers SloanSpace and the
contact person for training, information and problems is Deirdre Kane, dekane@mit.edu, 617-252-1110.
How to Register and Who can
self-register?
Use your full MIT email name (yoohoo@mit.edu)
to register yourself at http://sloanspace.mit.edu. You will be mailed a verification
email. Once you verify your
registration information, you can log in using the password you chose. If you do not use an MIT email name, then
you need to first register in SloanSpace and then make sure that your professor
to program administrator has sent dekane@mit.edu a list of the non-MIT people participating
in the class to community.
When you register, you create a profile containing basic information,
such as your full name, email, and personal home page (optional). You can edit your profile at any time from
the Control Panel page of your personal portal. This is also where you can correct any user information and
change your password.
Portals and portlets
SloanSpace is organized around the concept of portals for
groups: individual, class and community.
Each Portal page consists of “portlets”, which are tables of data that
deliver the content posted by groups.
For example, the Announcements portal will list all the current
announcements posted by a user's classes and communities (once those groups
have been joined). Through the
Customize the Portal link in the Control Panel, a user can add content to some
portlets (Stocks and Weather, for example), move the portlets to different
location on a page, add other portlets, or remove ones that you do not want to
see. Some portlets, Announcements, for
example, cannot be removed.
Joining Groups
Once logged in, the user enters the personal portal, which
is distinguished by its red headings.
Then each user needs to join the classes and communities to which they
belong. To join a group, go to the
Control Panel page and click the Join a Group link. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Join links next to
the desired class or community. Once
you have joined all your groups, return to your main page by clicking the My
Space link at the top of the page. Now,
you will see your groups listed in the My Groups portlet on your main
page. Follow the links for the classes
to the class portal pages. Any content
added to your groups -- Calendar events, Announcements, Bulletin Boards, Files,
FAQs, Surveys -- will get pushed/posted in your personal portal.
Personal Portal (Red)
The default pages seen in each portal are: MySloanSpace,
Calendar, My Files and Control Panel.
However, by selecting Customize
this Portal from the Control Panel, any user can modify the look of her
portal by rearranging the order of the portlets for any of the pages, and one
can add a new page to the portal. This
new page would then be listed at the top of the main portal page along with the
other default pages.
Community Portal (Green)
The default pages for this portal are: Community Home,
Calendar, File Storage, People and Control Panel. For the Spring of 2001, there will be a limited number of
Communities piloted: Sloanwide, Student Discussion Forums, Career Development
Office, and four student clubs:
MediaTech, Management Consulting, Sloan Women in Business and Graduate
Management Society.
Course Portal (Blue)
This portal delivers class documents, announcements,
assignments and other resources to the student, customized by the professor of
each class. All class sessions and
date-dependent assignments are in the class calendar, while additional files
and resources are downloadable from file storage.
Bulletin Boards
Each Course and Community can have bulletin boards for its
members. All users can post new topics
and reply to current topics. Please be
aware that when you reply via email, the reply posts all text in the body of
the email and does not interpret HTML, so delete all extraneous information
(including headers and footers) before submitting your reply. Users can edit their email alerts (by
default, all users receive email messages regarding all bulletin board
postings) through their Control Panel.
Calendar and File Storage
Users can use file storage for personal files, but there
is a 2 MB limit for all files and files can only be downloaded one file at a
time. Personal events can be stored in
the personal calendar and all group events will be pushed to each user's
personal calendar.