This week we deployed some more updates to MyEd, the University’s web portal. These are the latest in a series deployed as part of this year’s MyEd upgrade project. Users may not always see any visible difference, but these changes are essential to make sure that the technology MyEd runs on is up-to-date and secure.

MyEd upgrade project 2024/25

Every year we run a project to upgrade the technology that MyEd runs on. The exact changes we make vary from year to year, but are critical to ensure that MyEd continues to be reliable, and robust, and secure.

The big changes

The year we upgraded the software that MyEd runs on, React and uPortal. The React upgrade, which was the most complex, was successfully deployed at the end of May.  The uPortal upgrade followed, and was deployed at the start of July. These were both quite significant, involving a lot of work and a lot of testing to make sure that all the different parts of MyEd were upgraded correctly, and that we didn’t break anything by making these changes.

The small changes

Some of the changes we deploy are much smaller, but are also important.

This week’s update will improve the experience for our users. A few weeks ago, the way that users login to MyEd was changed. Following this, some users had problems logging in because their browser had cached the old login method. The update we have deployed this week should prevent anything similar happening in future.

We’ve also improved the accessibility of MyEd, resolving an issue that meant the skip to main content feature didn’t always works as it should. This feature helps users jump directly to the main content of a page, and is particularly important for people using screen readers or keyboard navigation. Fixing this problem required some quite major modifications to how MyEd serves content.

As well as these improvements for end-users, we’ve deployed some other changes that won’t be visible. However, these are still valuable – it’s now easier for us see how the system is running and troubleshoot problems, and the processes that are used to update and deploy MyEd are more efficient.