Publication Date: April 11, 2001
Author: General Manager: SFA School Channel
Summary: Portal Tip of the Week - Customizing Your FSA4Schools Portal Website
Posted on April 11, 2001
TO: Student Financial Aid Community
FROM: SFA Schools Channel
SUBJECT: Portal Tip of the Week - Customizing Your SFA4Schools Portal Website
Now that you have had a chance to explore the new school portal, FSA4Schools, we thought that we would offer some helpful hints in navigating your way around. For the next few weeks, we will be posting a "Portal Tip of the Week" in the form of an electronic announcement to the Information for Financial Aid Professionals (IFAP) Website.
This week’s tip is about customizing your school portal page. The first step that you need to take is to establish a user name and password by clicking on the link that says "Sign Up Now" in the My SFA area.
Once you have clicked on this, it will take you to a screen asking for some required information such as your first and last name, your email address, and then it will ask you to pick a password and then to confirm the password. The password can be anything that you choose, whether it?tm)s letters or numbers, but it can only go up 16 characters (Note ? This password is only for customizing the portal. It will not work on any of the other databases.) Once you submit the data, your user name will appear on the screen welcoming you.
Now that you are a registered user, you are then ready to customize the school portal to your liking. You would then return to the portal and type in your username and password and then click Go! You will receive a welcome message asking you to click on one of the three links to customize your portal. When you scroll down, you will see three options. The options are to Change Your Password (if you would like); SFA Links; and My Bookmarks.
When you click on the SFA Links button, it will list all of the SFA Links that appear on the portal homepage. Each one of these links will have a box beside it with a checkmark in that box. The checkmark indicates that this link is currently selected and will appear on the portal page. If you do not want a particular link to appear because you don’t) use that particular website, you would simply click on the box beside the link, deselecting it. Once you are finished deselecting any links that you may not want to appear, you would then go to the bottom of the screen and click on the Apply button.
You will then receive a message indicating that the process is complete and that you should click on the My SFA button to go to your personalized webpage. When you click on My SFA, you will notice that your changes have been made.
You can customize the portal even more by adding your own personal links such as your school’s web address. To add your own links, you would click on the My Bookmarks button. You will see a screen that says Add New Bookmark. In the Title box, you will put what name you want to appear under the links area on the portal. In the next box, you will type the url to this website and then click Add.
Again, you will receive a message indicating that the process is complete and that you should click on the My SFA button to go to your personalized webpage. You will find your new bookmark at the bottom of the SFA Links section, under Personal Bookmarks.
You have now created your own personal portal website that will have all of the SFA Links you use and your own personal links in one place. To add, remove, or change any of the links, you would simply follow the same instructions above and change the information.
We recommend that you add this new customized website to your list of favorites or even better to make this your new homepage. If you do not add this to your favorites, when you type in the FSA4Schools web address, it will go back to the original homepage without your changes.
We hope this information is helpful. If you have any questions, you can contact the SFA Customer Service Call Center at 1-800-433-7327 or you can send a question or feedback via email by clicking on the Got a Question? and Portal Feedback links located at the top of the FSA4Schools website.