SCT Banner YES Implementation Team

Meeting Notes

MEETING LOGISTICS

Item / Description
Date / October 8, 2007
Time / 8:30 a.m.

Location

/ MESHEL HALL – Computer Center Conference Room

ATTENDEES

Facilitator(s) / Eileen Greaf and Carol Chen
Note Taker / Cheryl Beil
Participants / Catherine Cala, Mary Lou Castner, Troy Cross, Bob DeFrances (for Beth Yeatts),
Donna Esterly, Becky Geltz, Jeanne Herman, Tim Kovaleski, Cindy Miller, Rick Marsico, Elizabeth Nelson, James Stanger, Jason Thomas, Bob Tupaj, and Donna Wainio.

Not Present

/ Sue Davis, Betty Jo Licata, and Donna Madacsi

AGENDA ITEMS

CORRECTIONS / Notes
Impl Mtg – 9/24/07
/ Email any corrections to Cheryl Beil.

REVIEW PRIOR ACTION ITEMS

/ See updates on items #1, #2, #5a-b-c-d-e, and 7a-b.

TEAM UPDATES

1.  Student
a. Regis/Record
/ Donna W. held training with dept. chairs, faculty and secretaries and received a very favorable response to Banner system. Expressed concern regarding how part-time faculty will be included. Questioned Banner’s functionality where only one instructor can assign grades although several faculty are teaching a course. Dept. chairs expressed a desire to maintain capability as in M-204 for the online closed class list where all course codes within a range can be viewed to determine what is closed or if a class should be cancelled/added. Student team agreed to request a report to provide this info quickly during the peak add/drop period. Also discovered that when students register for a class in SSB and then drop it, they cannot add the same class again without going to Registration office – classes can only be added again through INB. Past add/drop history reflects a significant number of add/drop/adds. Discovered that Banner 7.3 introduces a new Curriculum page and a new Field of Study page, attaching them to the already complicated General Student record. Jeanne will meet with Tom M. to discuss loading General Student info with these new records. Tom is developing an audit for Gen Student info, similar to audit on academic history – will also work on degree/transfers data conversion. New consultant Rob Woodyard will be on campus 10/9-11 for training; plan is to devote 1 day to registration, 1 day to academic history, and 1 day to catalog/schedule – will also address any issues encountered during Mock II. Eileen reported on YES Advisory Committee’s discussion of Student decision document; concerns were raised about points in business process and concept of using PINs to ensure student advisement prior to registering. The PIN will not impact ability to document how an advisor advises a student, which is current practice in legacy system. By comparison, YSU provides advisement to a greater number of students than many area colleges. In M-204, the advisor recommends a specific course code, but class time is an option for the student. By contrast, Banner is section driven – the advisor must approve a course code AND a specific class time. Eileen proposed that Donna W. provide an overview of the Student and faculty/advisor system at next YES Advisory Committee meeting to be scheduled early November; Jeanne H. will also attend with some faculty/advisors to provide input during discussion. Cheryl will coordinate a meeting date/time with Jeanne/Donna.
b. Admissions
(C.Chen for Sue Davis)
/ Carol reported that Sue Davis had requested that Computer Services continue to run a weekly discrepancy report between M-204 and Banner; however, Salem’s hard drive crashed recently and Christian’s work will have to be rebuilt. Admissions submitted a Banner Maint Request to develop an interface to electronically load NEOUCOM undergrad admissions appls (about 500).
c. Student Accts
/ Participated in Mock Registration II. Discovered that Bill Assessment was not working correctly; discussed possible resolution with Jeanne H. Will address issue with consultant Rob Woodyard this week. Since STMP data is corrupted, will use STFA data to register students and continue testing processes. Until attributes are changed for Fall, fees cannot assess correctly unless schedule/catalog is completed, variable hours classes are not billing correctly and financial aid is disbursing on incorrect billing hours. Did not test pop sels during Mock due to other issues. Successfully tested college fees and course fees (both flat and per credit). Will attend TouchNet cashiering training on 10/9 and bill payment training on 10/10. In process of setting up detail code for WebCheck process Carol used STWC in TN and Banner. Beth will decide the correct detail code to use in STMP and will change in WebCheck also. Troy/Mike set up remaining cashiering stations with station #5 being mobile for training purposes. Carol suggested she meet with Beth, Eileen, Jack Fahey (Housing) and Dan O’Connell (Parking Svcs) to discuss how to handle billing for students living in dorms; need to begin setting up detail codes in Banner for dorm room charges before moving forward.
2.  Financial Aid / Began Mock last week; were able to load all files and award packaging – rules worked correctly. Performed a basic disbursement on the main funds; Banner requires a Pell grant to be awarded in summer whether student wants it or not – differs from our current process. Staff worked in both STMP and new STFA instance with few problems. When consultant Ron Coker reviewed the job stream, he indicated that our process will not work because we have too many financial aid appls (2,000+); will need to divide into 3 groups and automate process to run overnight in Appworx to avoid system shutting down daily. IT staff is invited to sit in on next conference call if needed; Ron will share scripts from other large Banner schools for integrating jobs in Appworx. James submitted a Banner Maint Request to have 7.9 installed after Mock; Ron stress importance of installing now since it replaces all FinAid cobal programs for awarding that goes to API – our Ohio grant scripts will most likely not work since 7.9 includes new mandatory fields in tables. All user defined tables in 7.9 have changed and no longer use print drivers; job stream will have to be rewritten. Since process used during Mock is no longer applicable; must rework procedures document. Ron also said we must use memos for loans; will need to set it up with Beth Y. Also learned that no aid can be awarded for late adds after cutoff date in system unless Registration is willing to backdate a student’s registration. The 8-hour conf call with Ron Coker was most informative; would have been more beneficial if team had known these facts previously – must redo a lot of setup work and rewrite many procedures. Upgrade 7.9 eliminates 3 workarounds. Will visit Miami of Ohio on 10/23-24 to discuss FinAid issues with other Banner schools; Kent’s full-time Banner consultant will also attend and has agreed to answer any questions.
3.  General Person / No report given.
4.  HR/Payroll / Working on faculty/admin piece with HEI reporting. Marsha has an M-204 stand-alone data base with most of the tenure info for faculty; will contact Dennis K. to see if data can be extracted to populate spreadsheet for upload in Banner. Hired 3rd employee for Processing Center and have been assisting office with startup. Met with Bernie H. (Payroll) regarding stud employees, stud stipends, research assts, and occasional service staff to document past procedures and methods for handling exceptions; this workload will move to Processing Center this week. Also met with Sue Lewis regarding any additional documentation available for Classified employment. During HR/Payroll impl, Donna W. provided excellent documentation of employment processing but will supplement as needed. Continuing to work with auditors on payoffs, leave balances, etc. Still working with UDC on issues related to rolling positions at year-end. Assisting Patty S. (Budget) on positions that rolled with wrong labor distribution or account. Recently encountered issue with NBAPBUD form; when transferring an employee to a different ORGN, Banner does not transfer all budgeted funds related to the position – must go through SQL to make the change. Maureen is working on GMR for job activity. Troy reported that the requested Appworx job will be finished soon; need to resolve issues with generating multiple reports.
5.  MyYSU / Bob met with Jason R., John D. and DBAs regarding faculty/staff directory information in Banner. Jason set up conference call with current telephone vendor; agreed to send a comma delimited file to load phone info. Issue with using the bridge or an interface for adding/updating staff phone extensions in the Banner general person record is that there are no common fields to map info between systems. Future discussion and goals should include possibly considering a new phone system, combining the process for maintaining changes/updates to directory, and eliminating the current chargeback accounting process. We have not completed the self-service turn-on address piece for employees to update personal directory information. Based on Mock Registration, Donna W. reported that we need to have the email links from the portal go directly through the portal email as opposed to trying to open the default client browser; John Dalbec will research the issue. The Groups feature will also need to be revisited upon Student GoLive when faculty begin to use the registration piece. The class instructor will need to be designated as the Group Leader; will also need to devise a policy for archiving and deleting data for courses when setting up next semester courses.
6.  Finance / Mary Lou/Beth Y./Mary N. successfully tested sending a student refund to the Finance system using a new fund designated only for student refunds; Elaine B. was able to run checks against the transactions. Mary Lou will follow up with Elaine on testing of direct deposit. Continue to work on HEI reporting; Mary N. contacted NEOUCOM about inconsistencies in their parameters. Mary Lou/Elaine B./Beth Y. will meet with Stud consultant Rob Woodyard on 10/11 to briefly discuss student refunds and other outstanding A/R issues. Troy reported that IntelliCheck changes were installed in all instances except PROD; notify him when satisfied with testing so it can be moved into PROD.
7.  Advancement / Catherine reported on their August magazine mailing involving the new electronic mail address service implemented by U.S. Postal Service. Very satisfied with results – only 3,500 returns out of 78,000 pieces mailed. Of the 3,500 incorrect addresses, USPS provided 1,100 electronic addr corrections. No current address data was available for remaining 2,400; Advancement staff is researching and will try to correct these addresses prior to Annual Fund mailing in November. There was significant communication with the Memphis regional office that provided address corrections during this test process. Catherine plans to test again with another smaller mailing before Nov. Once Adv has exhausted all efforts to obtain correct addresses, these records will be marked “inactive” to avoid return costs on future mailings. Have loaded test disk on the Annual Fund mailing and will continue to update addresses; Computer Services will run it again just prior to delivering mail pieces to our mailing house to assure greatest accuracy. Catherine and Troy have been working with Alumni Relations to produce their FormsFusion invoice; have encountered an issue getting joint Alumni names to appear on the same form. Eliminated most duplications by deleting old data in one parameter but still are researching cause of remaining duplicates. Univ Development has a process to run a preliminary report to generate invoices; Alumni runs a different process which then runs letter generation using a list to create invoices. The list has a few columns with multiple lines of duplicate data (up to 28 dupls); changing the parameter resolved only the larger duplication cases so will continue to research issue. Received a request from Physics & Astronomy to possibly accept online registration for a symposium in March 2008 using credit card payment. Carol will try to schedule time with Chris Howard of TN this week to discuss the possibility of linking TN to a departmental website registration page. Catherine will contact PABUG or MABUG to discuss their existing online registration process.
8.  Communication / No report given.
9.  ODS/EDW / Carol reported that Mary N. is reviewing some changes to screens in WF Developer and Studio following the WebFocus upgrade. Troy is waiting for testing to be finished in ODST before moving WF 3.1 into PROD.
10.  Training / Held additional MyYSU sessions plus Finance SSB training and Payroll training for new users. Worked extensively with academic areas during Mock Registration; received a very positive initial response to Banner Stud system functionality – grading and student registration is easier than in SOLAR. Response to FinAid functionality was also very favorable; Academic Transcript is also straight forward and easy to use. On Days 2 and 3 of Mock Regis, also invited INB staff from FinAid, Student Accts, Records/Registration, and Admissions to see an overview of SSB side in Student – was greatly appreciated. After meeting with Rob Woodyard this week, will begin to involve more staff from academic areas in using the Student regis system. Received requests from some academic depts for individual departmental training. Unsure whether billing will be tied to TouchNet or if self-service environment will be modified. Bob D. asked whether Banner has a log similar to SOLAR that documents a student’s activity in the Banner registration system; Donna to check with Rob. The advantage in Banner is that there is no separate step to finalize dropping a class; the Student system and screen immediately reflect a dropped class. This should eliminate a large number of student appeals for billing disputes.
11.  Technical / Troy/Jason T. met to discuss Ban instances and requests for clones; they distributed a summary showing all instances created in Banner for use by a specific area and the designated staff person responsible for control of that instance. BANTRNG includes all Temporary and Permanent Test instances plus a TRNG instance for use by SGHE consultants. BANPPRD includes the PPRD and YTRN instances. While this setup may require a little more maintenance by tech staff, it will afford individual areas more control over their recloned data and related testing without impacting other areas that were using the same test data in the same instance. Upgrade maintenance will be the same in all test instances. Quality Assurance is a long-term goal to designate PPRD and YTRN exclusively for full integration testing and final prep before uploading to the PROD environment. Also provided a list of recommended procedures concerning specific Banner maint requests and practices which must be followed by designees to assure the best quality control for all Banner data and processes.
NEW BUSINESS
1. Banner system
interfaces / Carol will provide regular updates on the status of all Banner system interfaces needed by March 2008 for Student GoLive. Continue to make progress on Banner and Bookstore interface; the course file extract from Banner was sent to bookstore for testing.

ACTION ITEMS