SCT Banner YES Implementation Team
Meeting Notes
MEETING LOGISTICS
Item / DescriptionDate / May 5, 2008
Time / 8:30 a.m.
Location
/ MESHEL HALL – Computer Center Conference RoomATTENDEES
Facilitator(s) / Carol Chen & Eileen GreafNote Taker / Cheryl Beil
Participants / Mary Lou Castner, Troy Cross, Bob DeFrances (for Beth Yeatts), Mickey Hancharenko,
Mike Hrishenko, Jeanne Herman, Tim Kovaleski, Dona Madacsi, Rick Marsico, Cindy Miller, Elizabeth Nelson, James Stanger, Jason Thomas, Bob Tupaj and Donna Wainio.
Not Present
/ Catherine Cala, Sue Davis, Becky Geltz, Betty Jo Licata and Beth Yeatts.AGENDA ITEMS
CORRECTIONS / NotesImpl Mtg – 4/21/08
/ Email any corrections to Cheryl Beil.REVIEW PRIOR ACTION ITEMS
/ No updates were provided on Action Items due to length of meeting.TEAM UPDATES
1. Studenta. Regis/Records / Jeanne reported that Fall registration by appointment is finished and open registration is now in progress. Response to new Banner system is generally good from underclassmen; students are using registration 24/7. Will continue working on issues with pre-reqs. Continue to make progress on loading former students, but the primary focus is on handling summer registration issues for start date of 5/19; will then target loads of prior students requesting reactivation for Fall. Rob Woodyard is unable to come this week; his visits after GoLive have been helpful. Salem is loading student high school data that did not come over during conversion to Banner; this is necessary for FinAid. Holds on registration/transcripts were brought over only for current students; now need to bring over holds for all other student records.
b. Admissions / No report given.
c. Student Accts / Bob reported that first summer billings were sent out of Banner in mid-April. Some students questioned receiving multiple line items as possible duplications; this is caused when they do several registrations by individual class rather than a single full registration. Need a quick resolution to the Promise to Pay issue but need to be careful of system changes since Fee Assessment has already been turned on for Fall. A few summer bills were returned for wrong addresses due to the synch (these 30-40 addresses are correct in M-204 but not in Banner). Jeanne is correcting these records before Fall billing begins. Also, ~70 emails bounced back as undeliverable when uploading the Banner bills to TouchNet. Donna W. determined that many are graduate students who were former grad assistants – this necessitated dropping the @student.ysu.edu node from their student email address during their employment. John Dalbec is checking to see if these may involve student email accounts that are forwarded, which may have blocked ysu.edu email. Troy recommended that LDAP and GORMAL tables be reviewed.
2. Financial Aid / James reported that they continue to work on outstanding issues; Liz N. fixed issues with the Ohio scripts. Were able to send ~400 loans to Great Lakes for summer without any errors; several thousand were sent for fall with good response back and forth – process appears to work well. Liz has loaded loan process into Appworx, which will eliminate much manual processing. Encountered a problem in self-service when students are accepting their loan but not providing a loan period or expected graduation date and are exiting early–this creates an award but not a loan application (represents about 5% of our loan volume). Staff are contacting students to complete their applications. Some lenders are going out of business, which poses another problem.
3. General Person / Donna W. reported that, as part of the load, M-204 did not have a deceased date, just an indicator. Any HR or Advancement staff accessing one of these General Person records for modification will receive a prompt to enter the date of death before saving the changes. We are not currently using a generic date. Carol reported that the GP team recommended that we turn off the synch as of 7/1. This may change subject to discussions concerning a temporary workaround solution to allow Registration to produce student ID cards using the M-204 process. Rick proposed at the BTLT meeting to begin researching ways to replace the current ID system that has a magnetic strip card. Will need to find a temporary solution for our obsolete equipment that will interface with Banner. Carol will speak with our current vendor and contact Indiana Univ. (who elected not to build an interface with Banner) to discuss possible options. Carol will research ways to reduce the processing time for new student records in order to compare Banner data with M-204 and back to Banner.
4. HR/Payroll / Cindy Miller is once again Team Leader. People Admin and WebTime Entry are open issues.
5. MyYSU / The website portal advisory committee met 4/29 to discuss special issues as follows:
1) recommended updating the Announcements policy guidelines to include a statement that it is the responsibility of students/faculty/staff to check the portal as the preferred email source at least once a day for campus announcements and mass emails; and 2) recommended alternatives to forwarding email is to disable the forwarding rules while providing instructions for adding MyYSU email to 3rd party email request services. The website advisory committee agreed to move forward with the Classified Ads channel. Kathy Leeper will draft ads for the Jambar and flyers announcing implementation during summer. Committee will initially monitor the channel. Bob will communicate a final policy to George McCloud to determine if the matter should go first to the Advisory Committee for feedback before possibly sharing with Board members. Continued discussion with a small committee on the distinction between the portal and public websites for redesign. Since we will be adding internal use channels in the future, including one that will hold internal documents, we need to research security methods to block outside robots from searching and displaying our forms and information on other public web pages.
6. Finance / Mary Lou reported that A/P sent a Positive Pay test file to the bank on 5/2 and is awaiting a reply. Finance consultant Jim Klaiber will be on campus 5/7-8 for Grants training. Mary Lou will contact Beth K. for list of attendees to set up security access as needed. The May 8 outage has been communicated.
7. Advancement / No report.
8. Communication / No report.
9. ODS/EDW / Troy reported that Refresh-All was conflicting with the backup schedule; the schedule has been adjusted to run Refresh-All at 6PM and 6AM (process takes ~30-50 min.)
10. Training / Donna has been working with Student Team addressing various issues since GoLive, and they have finished DARS. Additional training classes will be scheduled for staff that has not attended yet or to re-address processes that have been resolved. Donna plans to present an overview for FinAid ODS training prior to the consultant’s visit and will coordinate with FinAid.
11. Technical / See New Business items below.
NEW BUSINESS
1. Internet outages / Troy reported that notice is received from TouchNet and Network Services for OARNet when the system will be down but a notification policy is needed for announcing other unexpected outages 24/7. Since we have a single internet provider, we cannot post a notification that the server is down. We could have a host off our network that could redirect any ysu.edu email to another address, but it would require intervention by Network Services staff at any time day or night. Advance announcements will be conspicuously posted on the portal homepage and the YSU homepage. TouchNet routine maintenance can be communicated via a link off the SSB page. Portal announcements are not necessarily being read. Rick proposed creating a separate channel for reporting outages; Bob T. will handle setup. Mickie suggested that we create an overlay Flash page on the YSU homepage to alert users before they try to access the system. Bob will discuss these options with the portal advisory committee. The 5/8 outage has been announced.
2. Banner access issues / Mickey H. distributed a summary report of common problems reported to the Tech Desk when trying to access the MyYSU portal; he reviewed each issue and recommended solutions.
#1) A confirmed bug in the Banner SSB is on SCT’s medium flaw list; must await a fix from SCT. When a student clicks too many times on the Registration or FinAid link while the page is loading, they are redirected to the Banner SS PROD login page in error. Donna W. suggested placing a message at the top of this page (if redirected to it in error through the portal) advising the user to close the page and log in again to avoid possibly disabling their account after 5 attempts and needing to have their password reset. The portal login does not currently disable the account after multiple login attempts or expired passwords.
#2) Unlike registration in SOLAR, Banner is set up such that, if a student registers for classes in Banner and clicks “Submit” but does not finalize their registration and sign the Promise-to-Pay (PTP) before exiting the system, their registration is still accepted and a bill is generated. Declining the PTP does not cancel registration. Doug wrote some reports to determine students who did not finalize registration. Jeanne stated that we must communicate to students the need to go back into Banner to finalize and complete the PTP to legally commit them to payment or to drop officially. Students who click “Finalize” and accept the PTP at least one time during the course of registering/changing classes for the term are not included on the report. Recommended posting a text message at the front end of the registration page explaining that, after clicking “Submit” and accepting the classes, a student has the option of overriding the registration by declining the PTP so as to not be assessed the sum-certain for those classes. The current policy is OBOR driven and likely cannot be revised; another option is to modify Banner. Jeanne indicated that the Student team will likely favor dropping registrations for non-payment. Jeanne will work to resolve the issue.
Other issues include: 1) students are unable to get a registration window through the registration link due to use of pop-up blockers; 2) an error message “page cannot be displayed” is received when clicking on Registration or FinAid links due to restrictive corporate firewalls or home firewall configurations; 3) some first-time students are unable to access the MyYSU portal using their initial logon ID/password due to incorrect/incomplete information on directory records from their patron records; 4) first-time Distance Learning students cannot log on to MyYSU due to an incorrect username or password – Banner does not have an indicator to identify students in DL program; 5) a “break-in attempt was detected” message is received if a student clicks too many times on Registration or FinAid links in MyYSU or if they use SBC, Yahoo or AOL Explorer web browsers; Spyware/malware and any browser helper objects also cause single sign-on to fail and send users to the SSB PROD login page where, after repeated attempts, their account is locked out; and 5) some students accepted in the College of H&HS are receiving acceptance letters that are missing their initial logon ID/password and email address due to synch issues or to a timing delay setting up their account. Tech Desk staff are offering solutions to callers for most reported problems or, when necessary, request that they come to the Tech Desk with a photo ID. Mickey’s summary report outlines remedies for most issues (see Addendum). Tech staff plans to create an FAQ section for Registration and FinAid pages to troubleshoot user issues.
3. Oracle 10g
upgrade / Jason T. reported that the Oracle upgrade is needed in order to accommodate a FinAid upgrade that is 10g specific and is needed for federal reporting by 7/1. Future releases will also require 10g. Jason installed the upgrade on the TEST server and has successfully tested it in a few instances. Plans are to install 10g upgrade in a few local instances to allow testing of daily processes and reports; then will upgrade PPRD instance for testing by all areas. Areas are asked to document critical functions to be ready for testing of all future upgrades. Other schools have experienced several performance problems when upgrading from 9i to 10g due to optimizer changes; Jason will research available fixes and select only those necessary. He will also email a timeline for installing in the local instances and requested prompt notification of any problems.
ACTION ITEMS
New Action Items / Issues /Owner
/Due Date
/Status
1. Assess need for revising currentpolicy on registration/cancellation /
Student Team
/ASAP
/Team will review current policy and discuss options for canceling classes for non-payment or not finalizing Promise to Pay agreement.
2. Resolution for unfinalized Promise toPay Summer registrations /
Student Team
/ASAP
/Team will continue to work with A/R, FinAid and tech staff to identify and notify current registrations with unsigned Promise to Pays.
Prior Items / Issues
/Owner
/Due Date
/Current Status
1. Review of portal usage policies /Bob Tupaj
/ ASAP /Website/portal committee discussed decision doc re: mass mailing vs. portal announcement; will review criteria required for mass emailing and make recommendation.