Monday, July 7, 2003

Updates/Announcements

• SCT Products – in discussion
• The project has received verbal price information for the SCT (and related) products still under consideration.  Ron Wilson (SCT sales) and James Brunner (Account Manager) will provide written cost information for products and services within the next few weeks.  The Project Office will schedule additional demos, as requested by LIMT.
• Web page statistics
• There was significant use of the project web pages in June.  More than 2000 hits were recorded on the page “expresslane how to”.  The student team page recorded more than 500 hits.
   

CServices Events 
Computer Services successfully installed Oracle 9i this past weekend, and migrated the SEED database.  This keeps the Oracle 9i/Banner 6.x plan on track.  Jan also installed several upgrades and patches and will e-mail the specifics to team leads.

Jan will do a clone of LANE to TEST prior to beginning the install of Banner 6.x in the non-production instances.  This is likely to occur the weekend of July 19.  This is the last clone that can be done before August 30-31, when all Banner instances will be on Oracle 9i and Banner 6.x.  The July 19 clone will need to support testing of faculty grade entry training, Student end of term processing, and Financial Aid satisfactory progress testing.  HR is interested in capturing some payroll data for testing as well. 

Issues

• Training Transition
• LIMT and Eric Mustoe, Lane’s Technology Trainer, discussed the transition of responsibilities regarding Banner training from the implementation teams to Eric.  Areas that will move include:
• Providing more general training for staff, including
• ExpressLane for employees
• Banner overview and general navigation
• Support for student use of ExpressLane
• Faculty use of ExpressLane
• Developing and maintaining a central and accessible schedule of all technology training for staff, including all Banner training, regardless of who is delivering the actual training,
• Developing a system for maintaining current files of all Banner-related (and other) training materials,
• Developing technology (i.e. web pages or CDs) to teach technology, and
• Providing training on using desktop tools, including use with Banner (i.e. Excel and Word).
Employee ExpressLane and Faculty training are needed for fall.  The Faculty training is already scheduled for the weeks of September 15 and 22.  Eric will check with HR (Lida Herberger) regarding their training plans.
Peer to Peer needs to know how to direct staff at the department level to appropriate training opportunities.  Eric should plan to meet with them when this information is developed and available.
LIMT needs to address access issues in the training instance.  It may be best to use training logons rather than individual ones.  In general, Eric should provide a sign-off that training has occurred before an individual staff member is given access to LANE.
• Programmer Responsibilities
• Computer Services provided a chart of programmer assignments and responsibilities.  Team Leaders should use this chart to determine which programmer to contact for various needs. It might be helpful to provide more specific information in the Student area, such as AR, facilities, academic history, etc.  Programmers will discuss this at their weekly meeting on Friday.  

LIMT discussed expanding the chart to include other Computer Services roles (Lori Brenden, Eric Mustoe) or even roles beyond Computer Services within modules.  Before proceeding with developing such a chart, LIMT will discuss:
• What is the purpose of the chart?
• Who is the intended audience?
• How does the chart provide different information from what is available in COPPS? 

• Student – The fall class schedule will be available on the web tomorrow without specific room assignment information.  Pre-requisite checking will be in place when advance registration opens on July 14.  Test score “aging” will work, but the team is still working on the concept of aging courses.  The AR consultant is back this week.  The team is still looking at reducing the number of people who have access to SFAREGS because of the workload this generates for the Operations Team.  SFAREGS creates a cashier session, and each of these must be closed and balanced at the end of each day.  Students First lines are somewhat reduced, but improvements in other processes, such as an increased number of financial aid award letters, has shifted and concentrated the number of students seeking assistance from Students First.
• Financial Aid – 940 students were paid in the first check run for 2003-2004.  There was a problem in that 24 students were paid too much, based on a combination of credit and non-credit enrollment.  14 checks were pulled.  The accounts for the 24 students will be adjusted, and checks will be mailed today to the rest of the students.  This meets the promised disbursement date for students.
• Finance is currently working on two years, with year-end activities for 2002-2003 and new year start-up for 2003-2004.  The Finance consultant was here last week, and the team completed the first of four one-time-annually tasks related to initiating a new fiscal year:
• Balances forward – completed
• Purchase Orders moved – end of July
• Budget moved – August 1
• Close the year for additional transactions – September/October
• Series 25 – The web fall schedule will be up tomorrow, probably without room locations.  In reviewing the first Schedule 25 run for fall term, the SpiT found both training and set-up issues.  They are working to fix the set-up issues, and also with individuals regarding the training issues.  The next run of S25 will occur early this week, and then schedule building can be opened up again for departments.  An audit conducted during the “down” time shows that no inappropriate addition of classes occurred.  R25 event schedulers are in training this week.