Connect.lehigh.edu was, for several years, a landing page to make it easy for people to find links to some of the more popular "authenticated" web sites here at Lehigh, such as Gmail, Ellucian Banner SSO,  and others.  The most recent iteration of connect.lehigh.edu links to Ellucian's Experience product, which, in some ways, simulates the campus portal experience by providing a single page with a number of customizable "cards" with links to various services. 

The Network Server and Portal: A History

The Lehigh Campus Portal was established in 2003 as a replacement for the Network Server, Launched in 1991, the Network Server was a Campus Wide Information System that provided email and electronic bulletin board access in a simple terminal interface. Prior to the Network Server, the university used a system providing similar services, called MUSIC/SP, which was developed by McGill University and sold by IBM. The system was in operation from 1985 to 1992.

The Campus Portal was built on a web application framework called Luminis, developed by Campus Pipeline, which was later acquired by SCT and now Ellucian. It provided a number of "channels" organized by a user’s role, and a single sign on (SSO) interface linking to a number of different services. In 2018, Lehigh’s Enrollment Services rolled out a new cloud-based student portal and graduate student portal which use software developed by EnrollmentRx (ERx) and runs on top of Salesforce.

The Campus Portal was decommissioned in June, 2020. 

The Perch is an internal digital communications platform, powered by Firstup, that launched in 2024 and provides a customized experience to the Lehigh community and connects students, faculty and staff to each other, and to all the latest Lehigh news, helpful campus resources and happenings.