Monday  November 10, 2003

Updates   

• New Training Link
• The faculty training has been linked from the left side of the staff Banner login page.  LIMT may want to further develop this space for additional information on Banner documentation, training and ExpressLane FAQs.  Jan and Lori will remove the text below the “For the LANE database” line and modify the text in the non-production access line.
  
• Additional Consulting
• The project has purchased four additional weeks of SCT consulting to support HR (position control and general consulting), Student (transcripts, population selections and A/R issues) and the production of 1098Ts.  These weeks are all scheduled, except for the 1098T time, which requires a technical rather than a functional consultant.  James is working on this change.   
  

• Clone plans?
• The Student Team has requested a LANE to TEST clone prior to December 8.  This request can be supported and requires the following deadlines:
• All modules must complete the testing of patches recently applied to the TEST instance.  Each team leader received a list of forms affected by the patches from Jan.  Testing plans should target every form and process on the list.
• Module leaders must notify Jan that testing is complete by Monday, November 24.  This notification should either be a go-ahead to proceed with applying all patches to production, or provide a list of exceptions.
• Jan will apply the patches (minus the exceptions, if any) to production and will clone LANE to TEST over the Thanksgiving weekend.  
  

• Extender Solutions - Interest?
  
• There is interest in implementing the SCT Extender Solutions (document management) in Financial Aid, Student and HR.  Finance may also be interested in the AP area.  Financial Aid can pilot this implementation for the 2005-2006 award year.
• AppWorks
• On October 14, Lane’s technical staff and 3 functional users attended a demo of AppWorks, a job scheduling tool that works with Banner.  Feedback received so far is very positive.  Linda has requested more feedback from demo attendees, and will research whether this type of software that interfaces smoothly with Banner is available from other vendors.
  
• R25 - Additional Seats
• The SPIT (Space Implementation Team) recommends purchasing 10 additional R25 scheduling seats to support additional schedulers in the Center for Meeting and Learning, Athletics and Performing Arts, and to add schedulers in the Workforce Network and BWEL.  This will move the college toward the goal of having all class and event schedule information available to staff and customers through the web viewer.  LIMT approved the purchase.   
  

• SPIT is discussing whether to roll space assignments from one term to another.  They will not roll summer or fall, but could roll winter.  This would be an advantage to departments that liked the spaces they were assigned, but a disadvantage for departments that did not.
• Financial Aid must be full participants in COD (Common Origination and Disbursement) for the 2004-2005 award year. This is an SCT requirement, because they will discontinue support for the pre-existing processes.  At this time, COD only affects Pell and Direct Loans.
• Finance is grappling with the issue of Positive Pay.  This is a process of transmitting data about checks we write with amounts to our bank, which then shares the information with the banking industry.  The purpose of this is to prevent check fraud.  LIMT approved the purchase of the Evisions module to implement Positive Pay for all checks written by the college.
• Student:  ExpressLane has really helped reduce the lines and service workload in Students First.  The CAPP (degree audit) visits are complete and the college has all program rules set up.  By December 1, academic advisors will begin using the system, and will be able to run “what if” scenarios for students.  According to the CAPP consultant, degree evaluations take more CPU time than any other process in Banner.  LIMT will need to weigh in on when and how this functionality is made available to students through ExpressLane.  Helen continues to work on getting a meeting scheduled with Continuing Ed to discuss maintaining the CE catalog.