The new Pipeline Beta is was released on Sept. 29 and has become the main Pipeline website for Harding students, faculty and staff according to Shawn Spearman, director of application development and enhancement.
With development teams constructing the website for over a year, Pipeline will showcase several new features that users will appreciate, according to Spearman.
“Our primary focus was to modernize this time around,” Spearman said. “This accounts for mobile devices. It was past time to update it.”
Pipeline will now have a new search feature that allows the user to attain information via typed response by exploring the website’s database. According to Spearman, the user will be able to toggle between a normal search and a people search. As for the new appearance, Spearman said the data will be familiar, but will be surrounded by a new interface.
“It’s a big change. It’s much more focused on searching,” Spearman said. “Things like the ‘Student’ section will remain, but other tabs such as ‘Faculty’ and ‘Employee’ will be changed to ‘Academic’ and ‘Administrative.'”
However, the upcoming release is not the first time the new Pipeline Beta has been tested. Before the first week of this semester, the core team of developers initiated the first trial run of the program. Following the initial release, the database revealed to be faulty and the developers shut it down, according to Spearman.
“We initially rolled it out, but with that came database complications,” Spearman said. “We had to revert back to the old Pipeline.”
Chief Information Officer of Information Systems and Technology Keith Cronk will announce the standardization of the Pipeline Beta this week, and it is not to be overshadowed by the recent email accounts being disabled, according to Director of Network Services John Nunnally.
According to Nunnally, anyone who owns a Harding email could receive a link from phishing websites that target people at random and steal their account credentials. Upon clicking the link, the website may use your email address to send spam to other users. In this case, Google will shut down your account and Harding will disable your account to prevent the virus from spreading throughout the network.
