Project 877: Personal Webpage Service End of Life FAQs

The exact details are still being determined since Project 863 is just getting started and many decisions have not yet been made. 

• Faculty will no longer maintain standalone personal sites across scattered platforms hosted by UNC Charlotte..
• Profile data will be populated from Watermark and Banner. 
• A decision will need to be made regarding whether or not Faculty desiring personal or custom web pages outside of Watermark can arrange external third-party hosting and have it connected to the central web environment. 
• Since it is unclear how many faculty use these services for teaching, OneIT is gathering feedback to determine recommendations for future need. Students can use Google sites for personal profiles.

• Communicators will benefit from structured, automated faculty profile data, eliminating manual entry and redundant maintenance across department sites.
• However, communicators must manage expectations for groups excluded from this platform (PT Faculty, some labs, staff and students).
• The impact during the planning and transition phase on the communicators during ’26-’27 will be greater as decisions are made.

Staff are explicitly excluded from Project 863 at this time. There is no plan at this time to continue hosting custom staff profiles on webpages.charlotte.edu, pages.charlotte.edu, or coefs.charlotte.edu. Staff will need to work with their web content managers if a page is desired in the central environment.

Students currently have access to create personal webpages on webpages.charlotte.edu.

• Students will lose access to personal web hosting on webpages.charlotte.edu after mid-May 2027. 
• During the 2026–2027 academic year, new student access is restricted to course-specific needs requested by faculty. 
• Students with existing accounts are encouraged to transfer their data to an external service. 
• Faculty will determine the best option for students to meet course assignments.

It is unclear how this change will affect affiliates. 92 affiliates have profiles on webpages.charlotte.edu. All affiliates were notified about the change on 9/17/26. No affiliates have reached out.

“Personal” is defined as anything not associated with an official university department. No one has looked at this question holistically; here are some best guesses.

Third-party sites that individuals may be using are not managed by the university and are not part of this discussion.

Webpages.charlotte.edu: Here’s information about webpages.charlotte.edu (detailed spreadsheet)

There are 57 Faculty affected by this change. NOTE: This list contains personal information and should not be shared publicly.

pages.charlotte.edu – Alex Chapin can answer this question

coefs.charlotte.edu: 15 lab pages and 29 faculty pages

Account holders were notified on 9/17/26 following a 9/16/26 news article. Only six information requests have been logged to date: Faculty (1), Other (1), Class (2: Shaan Patel [142019], Jeff Raquet [141681]), Lab (1: Jose Martins do Outeiro, ENG), and Faculty Classroom Archive (1: Gabor Hetyei). The key remaining use case to resolve is hosting for classes.

If directly associated with the university, research lab pages, center pages and staff profiles may move to the central web hosting services if aligned with current practice. Customization options may be limited. Decisions have yet to be made.

Webpages for affiliated organizations loosely affiliated with the university and hosted on webpages.charlotte.edu should discuss the migration path to central web service or  seek independent commercial solutions. It is unclear how many of these sites exist. Additional conversations need to happen.

Gap: Since the project is just starting, it remains unclear whether faculty will be able to toggle specific data fields on or off for public display in Watermark. If toggle functionality is unavailable in Watermark, Academic Affairs will need to establish a uniform agreement on displayed data fields. Additional conversations need to happen.

Expanding scope to include staff or a taxonomy-driven directory was rejected due to resource constraints and the lack of a reliable system of record for staff data. Leadership decided to keep the project strictly focused on immediate risk reduction for faculty pages.