Monday, August 19, 2002

Updates/Announcements
The lab that LASR has been using in Building 12, Room 119 may not be available in Fall term.  Linda DeWitt will check with Pam McClelland about continued availability of this valuable facility.  The Finance Implementation Team requests that the login process for end users be consistent from day to day.  Computer Services will address this issue.  Computer Services is working on a spreadsheet that identifies the differences in functionality between Internet native Banner and client/server.  James Brunner will follow up on resolution of issues that are known to work in Banner but are not working at Lane.  Dennis Wilson, SCT Finance trainer, has noted that spreadsheet budgeting is one function that does not work in internet native Banner 5.3.  The Instruction and Student Services (ISS) Office has decided that Cheryl Roberts and Jane Scheidecker will represent ISS on the Steering Committee for the coming year.

Extended Learning Update
The new name for Extended Learning is Business, Workforce Development and Extended Learning (BWEL).  The Reporting Strategies Team is discussing how and under what circumstances information can be moved between Banner and other information systems.  Goals are to minimize redundant data entry and to maintain accurate and consistent data in all systems.  This team is also looking at the reports available in Banner.  Computer Services is committed to addressing BWEL’s information system needs along with those of the rest of the college.

Finance Update
The Budget Office continues work on the budget crosswalks in preparation for loading the adopted budget into Banner.  They expect this to be completed by the end of this week.  They expect that the adopted budget will be in Banner by early to mid September.  Corrections will take some time after that.  Last week, Finance and Human Resources had a joint training on position control with the SCT Human Resource and Finance consultants.  One issue that emerged during the training was whether to encumber budget as a step in the PAF process when part-time faculty and classified staff are hired.  The issue was referred to LIMT.  Encumbering budget will provide better information for departments about budget availability and will establish a common business practice for the college. LIMT recommends that Finance and Human Resources move forward with the concept of encumbering budget for part-time employees. This business practice will require training for managers and administrative assistants.  Some administrative staff may need additional FOAP training.  It may be possible to develop this from the original training materials developed by Tasha Drake and Alan Feldmayer as a written communication with examples that could be posted on the Web.  Linda DeWitt will contact Linda Osak to discuss the development of this type of training material.

Human Resources Update
Current Human Resources work was covered in the Finance report.

Student Update
The Student Team would like to see the LIMT Training Team (Pruch, Simmons, Barker and DeWitt) expanded to include one or more Student representatives.  Sylvia Sandoz and Jennifer Knight are working on identifying all the student intake forms currently used by the college.  Because of the difficulty of having all the pieces of the process ready for the 2003-2004 year, the Student Core Team plans to use an “advance registration” approach rather than the annual registration concept currently used at Lane.  Annual registration is triggered by an advising contact and consists of a dual step “reserve and confirm” approach to the actual registration.  Advanced Registration would include the following components:
· Requires an advising contact,
· Flag students who advise with an attribute in Banner,
· Open registration for future term(s) earlier for flagged students than for other students,
· Eliminate the printed annual schedule. Departments would still need to do the work of developing the schedule, but the deadlines would be pushed back by at least five weeks.
The Student Core Team has discussed this plan with Rich Freund, Donna Koechig and Angela Miller, and all agree that it will work and is a good strategy for 2003-2004.  The Student Core Team will re-evaluate the concept for 2004-2005.

Financial Aid Update
Financial Aid is working through testing data loads and budgeting and tracking groups and concepts in TEST. This work is going well.  The team has produced the first piece of system documentation for the data load process.  LIMT discussed getting instructional departments involved in the Series 25 implementation by requesting that they begin identifying attributes of rooms and requirements for courses.  As we work on training plans, we need to address the training needs of all the employees who assist students.  This will include people not readily apparent as being involved with assisting students with college information.