This is a ground-up rebuild of the Research Portal, and it's now open for you to try. Nothing about the portal you use today has changed — this runs alongside it. For why we rebuilt it and what's different, see the FAQ.

Everything below is available right now.

Sponsored projects

Open any sponsored project and you get its header details, a financial overview, and the supporting tables: payments and outstanding invoices, expenses by month, expense categories, cost share, subcontracts, and the project team. Inception-to-date and monthly figures drill down into the individual transactions behind them, so you can go from a total to its source without leaving the page.

Each project page also shows when the data warehouse behind it was last refreshed, and whether that refresh succeeded — so you can tell how current the numbers are.

Non-sponsored projects

Non-sponsored projects have their own list, header, financial overview, and project team view.

People and salary

See who has been paid from your projects, filtered to the last six months or the last three years, with payroll broken out month by month for any individual. Salary detail is available where your access allows it.

Pending proposals

Pending proposals are listed with tabs for all, still-active, and not-funded, so you can keep the list current as decisions come in.

Protocols

IRB and IACUC protocols are listed per investigator, each opening to its own detail page, with associated funding shown for IRB records.

Favorites and quick access

Star investigators, projects, and people to pin them for next time. People favorites include a Northwestern directory search, so you can add someone who has never been paid from one of your projects. Staff also get a Quick Access page: jump straight to a project by its number, or pick back up from the projects you looked at most recently.

Getting data out

Most tables have their own export button for just that table. For a whole project, one download produces a single Excel workbook with a tab each for the header, team, payments, expenses by month, inception-to-date, cost share, subcontracts, and outstanding invoices. It's built in the background and notifies you when it's ready.

Smaller things you may notice

• Most tables paginate rather than scrolling forever, so you can see how much is there.
• Tables start with the columns the current portal shows, and you can switch on additional columns that the underlying report returns.
• Non-obvious field names carry a definition pulled from Northwestern's official business glossary.
• Signing in uses Northwestern Online Passport and Duo, the same as other University systems.

Telling us what's wrong

The most useful thing you can do is compare a project you know well against the current portal or Cognos and report anything that doesn't match. Missing columns, missing reports, and slow pages are all worth reporting too. The FAQ explains what kind of detail makes a report easy to act on, and who to contact.