Campus Management Status Report ~ 02-10-2003

Overview

Integration testing continues with mostly positive results:
- The web booking test that took place on 1/24 went well. At that point there was an issue with dropping classes, which has since been resolved. A second test will take place on 2/24.
- Buster and Lena demonstrated their Sigma - CM disbursement process to representatives from Financial Aid and the Bursar's Office on 1/28. The new interface provides for much better tracking and error handling.
- Jill has completed the test score upload program for ACT and will enhance it to handle other test types. She is working on the correspondence that is generated as part of test score uploads. Buster has developed a way to insert non-Print Workbench items into the Print Workbench framework so that items such as test score notices can be included in the student's correspondence tab.
- Jason and Tim demonstrated the Law Admissions application and workflow to representatives from the Law School on 1/30. An outcome of this test was to determine the process for handling cases in which an admission decision must be reversed. A suitable process has been identified and documented.
- Marlies Burkhard and Deborah Smith have been testing fees calculation with mostly successful results.
- Jason and Tim are almost finished with the Graduate admissions application and workflow. It differs from the Law School scenario in the routing that must take place. They are planning for a demo this week.
- Rick, Charlotte and others tested various student actions such as withdraw from program. These tests were successful. As part of this process they identified areas that will require special handling in terms of training.
- Data migration work continues. A second test of 100 students took place last week to verify that problems found in prior tests had been corrected. Brenda is reworking the legacy extract of study segments to better handle cases in which programs are unknown. Ross has completed the status/hold migration process. There are some data challenges wrt/ deleted programs, specializations and certain kinds of historical grades.
Onice begins the first training sessions this week. The schedule is quite full, and we are urging departments to let us know in advance if they need to change times.
We are very pleased with/appreciative of the proactive appraoch that CM development is taking to ensure that system performance is adequate. They have analyzed several of our data migration programs to achieve performance improvements. In some cases, this has entailed changes to our programs and in others changes to SAP software, e.g., the evaluation of the calendar. This week performance experts are connecting to observe booking.
Maria is continuing to investigate the new correspondence functionality. Over the next couple of weeks, we will bring in folks from the three admissions areas to begin developing their letters and forms.

See individual team reports (Academic Structure, Student Administration, Student Accounting, Reporting, Web / Interfaces, Organizational Readiness, Technology Infrastructure) for additional detail.

Academic Structure

Accomplishments/Activities

Denise and Jamie are going back and entering delivery mode information into CM based on the Provost's Office statement that the mode of delivery, traditional or non-traditional (Interactive or Compressed Video; Online, Internet, or Web-based; Other Distance Learning), should be recommended by the department chairs.

There is also concern that the grading scales in CM are not correct for all courses. A comparison report between SIS and CM will be generated for all courses/grading scales and manually compared to verify the course grading scales in CM.

Dr. Maurice Eftink has entered several courses into the new course eforms process as a trial for the Graduate Council. A few problems were encountered with the eforms process due to the last patches added to production but Veena Mantena quickly fixed these so that Dr. Eftink could demo the eform process to a combined meetin gof the Graduate and Undergraduate Councils on Feb. 7th.

Information regarding valid major/minor/emphases combinations has now been received from all Schools/College. Discussions will be held next week to determine how to use this information to set up the data migration in academic structure.

Project Plan Status

Tasks Behind Schedule

New Issues

Action Items

Major Activities Planned for Next Two Weeks

Student Administration

Student Accounting

Accomplishments/Activities

It has been suggested that we might want to email monthly statements. We certainly feel this option has merit especially if we can provide monthly statements over the web just like Capital One or any other U. S. credit card company does. We could give students the option of having an electronic statement and email them when the statement is posted for them to pay. Of course, if we go down this path, we should provide the student with the ability to look at his/her account in real time just like Capital One. We feel that this option is a future action item as there is certainly not enough time to configure by the March 7 go live date.

Work continues on the format of the monthly statement based on the design we worked up last summer. The final format is still a work in progress; however, the minimum go-live elements of our billing statement must consist of the following:

Balance forward from last billing statement
Transactions during current billing period: payments, charges, credits, service fee, etc to include the name and telephone number of the department initiating the transaction as well as a brief description of the transaction (this is part of the main/sub configuration).
Ending balance.
A message area on the bill for free-form text

Our monthly statement format is based on the U.S. model of the typical credit card statement. As a side note, our counterparts at the University of Southern Mississippi also embrace credit card format based on the U.S. model. USM converted to PeopleSoft a year or so ago. PeopleSoft's out of the box monthly billing statement was based on an "open item" approach and USM decided that the open-item approach was not acceptable. USM went live with the credit card format (balance forward approach).

A meeting was held with the School of Pharmacy concerning the $300 seat deposit they plan to collect for the 2003 fall semester. It was agreed that Pharmacy would be responsible for the collection and recordkeeping associated with the fee. Pharmacy will deposit all seat deposits to an agency account via a daily cash report to the Bursar's Office (departmental deposit). When the last day to drop has passed for the 2003 fall semester, Pharmacy will send over a list of students who completed the registration process and are due to receive a credit for the deposit. The Bursar's Office will post a credit to the students' accounts via an acceptance request. Main and sub transactions will be established for this process.

We began to test fee configuration.

Project Plan Status

Tasks Behind Schedule

New Issues

Action Items

Major Activities Planned for Next Two Weeks

CM Reporting

Accomplishments/Activities

Identified strategy for historical reporting Developed schedule for IHL and IPEDS reporting (first report due in May) and dates to freeze files.
Tested admissions selection method using SAP-supplied logical database (LDB)
Worked with Donna to design node structure for admissions LDB.
Worked out problems with roll-up functionality of events LDB.

Project Plan Status

Tasks Behind Schedule

New Issues

Action Items

Major Activities Planned for Next Two Weeks

Design tables for the three types of historical files: student, course and graduation.
Continue to develop queries to support testing
Test admissions selection method once LDB is available
Work with Joachim on statutory reporting