For the past few months I’ve been pretty much ringside on a lot of new things and some pretty epic changes to this old University. One of the foremost, and I’ve discussed this at length before with family members is that we have a new vice president. This new VP is the whirlwind, it’s quite something to watch. It’s also the first time in a very long time that people have started to come to us both (my assistant and I) with really great questions. It used to be that technology wasn’t so very important and now, well, everything has changed.

We’ve released upon this world a brand new WMU experience, it’s a part of our new engagement platform that I had an integral part in forming along with (and I love this) a real team of coworkers. Not a mindless committee of disaffected drones but real passionate and incredibly creative people! It’s a refreshing change. This new experience has a new “front door” and two blogs attached, the “Western Express” which I named and am very proud of, and WMYou, the Alumni blog which has some really incredible people writing for it. You can find it all here, at MyWMU.com.

It’s quite stunning to me to see the responses we’ve gotten from the quality of our site. I don’t know if it’s modesty but this effort is what I would expect anyone in IT to be able to pull off without blinking an eye, turns out, at least from the feedback we’re getting, that what we did here is a whole order of magnitude better than the competitors. I’ve never really considered what I do to be remarkable in any way, I’m just doing a rather even-keeled job of things as far as I am concerned, but apparently it’s more than anyone expected. I feel good about all the kudos but I also feel a little awkward about all the other IT people who aren’t making things like this happen. I worry over the differences. Then again, I’ve always worried over those differences. I suppose I’ll never understand, and as far as I’ve gathered from my management, I bet they hope I never understand either. 🙂

So the site is up, and it was created in an atmosphere that I think is best summed up by what Craig Ferguson said about Dr. Who:

“The triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.”

I just love that, and in many ways, that’s what this new site feels a lot like. It took a long time for me to stop bludgeoning dead horses and see the light as it were. Now that I have, all the turkeys that used to get me down suddenly are very small things and easily ignored. I hope everyone enjoys this new resource and we’ve got some really cool things planned for it in the weeks to come.