OIT provides webspace to faculty, staff and students for a number of different purposes. Faculty, staff and students may request web space on people.smu.edu for individual or instructional web sites. Departments and student organizations may request web space which is housed directly on the smu.edu, blog.smu, or people.smu servers.
Communicating to campus only?
We recommend reviewing the collaboration tools that are optimized for campus-only communications.
Web Hosting Options
OIT provides webspace to faculty, staff and students for a number of different purposes. Use the chart below to find the right solution for you needs.
| smu.edu |
Public or marketing content of official SMU departments or sites that support official SMU business. Content managed with Sitecore. |
|---|---|
| blog.smu | Sites needing a blog format or features specific to WordPress. |
| people.smu | Faculty, staff, or student personal WordPress blogs. |
| faculty.smu | Faculty academic and research sites. (This server is no longer recommended. All new faculty sites should go on people.smu.edu.) |
| smu365 | Internal (intranet) sites, especially those needing SharePoint functionality. |
| wiki.smu | Internal (intranet) sites needing robust wiki functionality. |
| sites.smu | Sites that cannot go anywhere else due to technical reasons. Use of this system is discouraged and should only be considered as a last resort. sites.smu.edu is a vanilla Windows web server running IIS. |
There may be additional technical considerations that further narrow choices. For example, www.smu.edu has no facility for password-protected or IP-restricted content, so intranet stuff must go on other servers.
Who Can Have a Web Site?
The following groups or individuals may have a web site hosted on SMU servers:
- Any official part of the university, such as divisions, schools, departments, etc., provided that the part's site does not conflict with, duplicate, or overlap with a parent part's site.
- Students, staff, and faculty may host academic, personal, and research sites at people.smu.edu.
- Faculty may host academic and research sites at faculty.smu.edu, but note that this is a deprecated server that doesn't have WordPress.
- Organizations and groups:
- Any undergraduate student organization may have a web site only while it is chartered through the Student Activities Center. This is per a 2000-ish agreement with the SAC.
- Any graduate student organization may have a web site if it is sponsored by a school.
- An employee group that is furthering official university business may have a space hosted within the site of their sponsoring entity.
The following may not host sites at SMU:
- Any organization not listed above.
- Employee organizations or causes that are not connected to official university business or exceed the employees' responsibility at the university.