The promised search improvements are simply lacking. It is the same old infrastructure with a new coat of paint. You would think the budget adjustment form would come up under a search for “budget adjustment”. But no.

When I was finally able to log in on Tuesday, I also discovered that the pages for Public Service, and indeed the entire “Intellectual Life” section, were missing altogether. They have since been restored, but only after complaints were lodged.

The larger text is great for eyes sore from reading casebooks, but combined with the narrower layout, it means less info visible at once–fewer events, fewer meetings, more clicks, and fewer impressions for on-campus groups jockeying for space to publicize their events. I agree that there should not be too much noise, but at least show a few in the default view! Two clicks later, when you finally arrive in calendar view (which by the way is much better than the previous endless list), it’s in a popup, and printed in tiny text. Leaving the default title on the page makes it hard to find in my forest of open Westlaw tabs. What’s a Trumba, anyway? The calendar import is much-needed, but for some reason it double-adds events to Apple iCal.

Layout and navigation are confusingly similar to the main brooklaw site. At the same time, it’s strikingly different from the old BLSConnect, meaning we all have to learn new tricks. There’s a way to improve site nav without changing everything from familiar to strange.

Finally–and I can’t confirm this one–one of my biggest gripes about the old BLSConnect (communicated to External Affairs when they held a small group session last year on the topic) was that there was no way to tell when a class had updated its page or posted a new document. Yet there does not appear to be anything new there, though since none of my professors uses it much (and who would?), I am not able to test this hypothesis. At least it’s front-and-center after login, meaning fewer clicks. Was a little green “(1)” too much to ask?