Monday  December 8, 2003

Topics   

• Annual/Advance Registration
• For the first year of Banner, the Student Core Team implemented an “advance” registration concept rather than “annual” registration as it was done in COCO.  “Advance” registration allows students who participated in spring academic advising to register for the next term in the third week of the current term.  This was originally seen as a way to support the priority registration concept in an environment where schedule builders had to enter all sections for every term.  Advance registration worked so well that it will replace the former process of annual registration beyond the Banner implementation year.
• Students who participated in advance registration for winter term and who still owe the college for fall term charges will be advised this week by letter that they must pay the fall charges by December 30 or they will be dropped from winter classes on December 31.  For spring, winter charges must be paid before returning/continuing student registration begins.  This information will be provided to students in the class schedule.  Generally, advance registration will begin on Wednesday of the third week of the term for the next term, unless this timing conflicts with a payroll deadline.
  
• Draft of 2004 Payroll Calendar
• There is a cross-functional group that will begin working this week on a master schedule that incorporates several aspects of registration activity, including section building, advance registration, web schedule availability, Schedule 25 runs and print schedule development.  The availability of information online that was formerly only available to students in print mandates this multi-functional look at these activities. 
  
• Finance Training Announcement
  
• Finance has scheduled a 2-hour training from 1:00 to 3:00 on December 17.  This is basic finance training, intended for staff who have not previously had any finance training.  However, there will be time for questions.  The training will be held in a CIT lab, to be announced.
• Other
• HR provided a draft of the 2004 payroll calendar.  HR still spends about 4 hours each payroll, calling approvers and super approvers to remind them of the deadlines.  P2P members noted that there are problems with completing these processes when individual approvers are not available, and requested a contact name in HR for these types of payroll-related emergencies.
• P2P requested charts from Finance, Student and HR of whom to contact with specific needs and questions.  Module leaders in these areas will develop the charts and work with the technology trainer to make sure they are available to staff.
• In a conversation with the Technology Training Coordinator, P2P identified the following training needs:
• Macros in Excel
• Migration to new versions of Excel
• Editing macros
• How to reconcile a budget that does not roll up (note: Finance is working on testing “roll ups” of orgs. ET is considering this within the context of how we want the college to operate.)
• Template reports to deal with the preceding issue until larger issues are resolved
• Web page development and upkeep
• Word for Word Perfect users
• Pivot tables in Excel
• Long document management
• Microsoft Access (related to my job!)
  
• Advanced training in purchase orders
• Banner reports for all modules (note: Thwing is working on a position report)
• How to find “stealth” transactions in Banner Finance.
  

• Follow-up on question about students submitting multiple course evaluations if they do it within one login to ExpressLane:  Ron Rourke, the programmer for this functionality says that only one survey per course per student is stored and evaluated.