SOU students and employees will have a new user experience as they access features on the Inside SOU website beginning next week, when the university migrates from one platform to another. The new Inside SOU will have a more compact and easier-to-navigate layout, but will still offer secure access to most of the web-based information available on the website’s previous version.

Inside SOU – the internal website for members of the campus community – will migrate from the Joomla content management system to WordPress at 1 p.m. on Sunday, March 9. The previous version of the website will no longer be available.

The new website will still offer links to features and apps protected by Okta, SOU’s multi-factor authentication provider, including email, calendar, Google Drive, moodle, Workday and box. It will also provide access to SOU News; quicklinks to sites including the SOU academic calendar and course catalog; student resources such as registration tools, Degree Works and EAB Navigate; current highlights from the SOU Events Calendar; and more.

The most noticeable feature that will be missing from the new Inside SOU is the current online directory for faculty, staff and students – which is difficult to maintain and has long been out of date. But employees, including student employees, will still be able to securely look up contact information for other faculty or staff members by using tools available on either Zoom or Workday.

Once logged into Workday, for instance, employees’ contact information and job titles can be found by simply typing their first or last names into the search box at the top of the page. Employees who have been assigned Zoom phones, based on their roles and business needs, can call each other in that app.

The new Inside SOU page also offers a campus directory link with basic contact information for SOU departments. And faculty or staff using Workday can type in a department name in the search field and all employees in that department will be shown.

More than 40 “online services,” listed with links on the right-hand side of the current version of Inside SOU, will available on the new website via the Okta dashboard. Apps for some of those services may need to be loaded from the “Add Apps” icon on the Okta dashboard. Users can continue to log into Okta from Inside SOU following the transition, or can log in directly at https://okta.sou.edu 

The new platform for Inside SOU is intended to make navigation easier and more efficient, with better performance, reliability and security. Those who have difficulty accessing Inside SOU following Sunday’s migration should clear their browser’s cache; if that doesn’t resolve the issue, the Information Technology Department’s Help Desk can be reached at helpdesk@sou.edu.