Rich new features for OpenAthens Administrators and MyAthens users

Eduserv has recently unveiled some new features to the OpenAthens service that will enhance the experience for the administrators and developers that maintain access to resources through OpenAthens, and the learners and researchers who use MyAthens.

MyAthens provides organisations that use OpenAthens and Athens to access electronic resources with a means of quickly creating a customisable interface for their users to effectively manage their access to these resources alongside others that they may use from elsewhere on the internet.

Administrators can now use a host of new tools to make managing access to resources even easier than before, offer great control over their users’ activity and offer users a better online experience all round. These enhancements have been developed in response to feedback we received at the Product Advisory Groups and events held earlier this year.

The first five can be found under the MyAthens menu:

Upload your institution logo
You can upload your institution’s logo so it appears on the MyAthens login page.

Create your own custom search panels
Would you like your users to be able to search Google, Yahoo! or one of your institution’s websites from the MyAthens portal? Adding those panels is easy using the new custom search panel editor.

Easily build custom panels
Create panels with the content of your choice. Easily add text, lists, logos or links with the simple WYSIWYG editor, or use the HTML editor to add more advanced features.

Include links to non-Athens authenticated resources in MyAthens
Enable students and researchers to navigate to Athens and non-Athens protected resources within a single interface.

Non-Athens authenticated resources can be allocated to permissions sets, where you can modify access to selected groups of users.

Add or remove custom panels from your users’ MyAthens homepage
MyAthens users can choose what to include on their MyAthens homepage – but you control which panels are available for them to add.

The next two functions are under the Statistics menu:

See statistics on activity for Athens and non-Athens protected resources
Find out the most popular resources accessed each month with interactive graphs.

A new menu item gives you access to UK Federation statistics in the same format.

Diagnostics and auditing for faster support
Track user actions such as login, password changes and locked accounts for OpenAthens MD, DA and Shibboleth accounts.

Quick account add
All you need is Forename, Surname, Email Address- everything else is handled for you! Find it under User accounts > Add.
We’ve also introduced pagination and filtering on user account pages to make navigating long lists easier for you.

There are also some great new features for MyAthens users, including:

Enhanced del.icio.us panel
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking tool which people can use to store, share and discover bookmarks on the web. Now users can add their own or their organisation’s del.icio.us account to their MyAthens homepage and search content by tags.

Customisable appearance
Users can change the appearance of their MyAthens homepage by changing the Page Style in the browser.

For more information or help with these features, please contact us at the Athens Service Desk.

OpenAthens Workshops in May 2009
There are also a series of OpenAthens Workshops taking place in May for administrators and developers. Find out more information and book your free place here.

We’d love to know what you think of the new features, and are always looking to improve our services, so please send you feedback to application.development@eduserv.org.uk