Campus Management Status Report ~ 02-24-2003

Overview

The web grading test went well. Several faculty members participated in this and provided excellent suggestions. A follow-up test is scheduled for mid-March to re-test after incorporating their feedback. We are upgrading Tomcat and XALAN on our web servers to take advantage of opportunities for performance improvements.
The Orientation test went well. The session registration form has been completed (Eric Aitala) and is linked to the Touchnet payment server. Whitman is set up to manage his merchant account on the Touchnet server. Linda Bailey has configured TEM to support Orientation. Thanks to HR for sharing this space with us. Work continues on Orientation correspondence.
Marlies Burkhard and Deborah Smith are continuing to test fees calculation with mostly successful results.
Jack and Lee are testing Cash @ Desk and have found some gaps. A conference call is set for Tuesday with Joachim to explore solution possibilities.
Data migration work continues. Last week, IT had a "data migration blitz" to complete the remaining data sets. This was a productive event. A new run of 5000 students is taking place this week to verify that problems found in prior tests had been corrected. All datasets will be included except for specializations. As part of this, we have developed solutions for various issues related to grades migration, e.g., how to represent honors courses in CM. Thanks to Joachim for his advice on these issues.
Onice continues an extremely active training schedule. The schedule is quite full, and we are urging departments to let us know in advance if they need to change times. She is scheduling several after-hours sessions to fit everyone in.
Kathy is working with Al Ling, Candice McMinn and Kevin Herrara on outgoing internal interfaces. The aim is to develop a general-purpose solution that can be easily extended to meet the needs of other UM offices. Note that ID barcode and mag strip will be stored in CM.
Through a joint effort by Systems, Basis (especially Anil!), ACSS and others, we are very close to realizing the account manager fucntionality that will result in the dynamic creation of student accounts (webID/sunset/Blackboard/R3) at the point of admission (thank goodness!).
Last week IT created LDAP (aka webID) and sunset accounts for admitted students to allow them to access online Financial Aid information. The Office of Financial Aid handled communication of account information to these students. A second run will take place next week.
The next CM newsletter should hit desktops any day.
Tomorrow we will begin migrating events (aka the course schedule) to PRD. Thanks to Denise Knighton, Onice Carter and Pam Barefield for their work in making this data "squeaky clean".
We are gearing up for the cut-over during Spring Break. The SAP Support Desk will move to PBJ for a minimum of four weeks beginning 3/17 to allow for ample CM support. Thanks to Buster Clark for his help in arranging for phone transfers to support this. The plan is to take legacy down on 3/7 to begin migrating student data. We will come up on CM on 3/17.
On Thursday, Joachim will conduct a "webinar" on creating transcripts with SAPScript.
Jason was able to enhance the admissions workflow to create student R/3 account as part of WF-Batch, and in doing so, solved a challenging authorization problem. An issue remains wrt/ the creation of the contract account. Joachim and Udo have proposed a solution, which we are pursuing with them.
CRT 13 is available and will be installed on the sandbox this Friday.
We are continuing to place a high priority on correspondence, particularly in finding a set of tools that will meet the various needs of UM offices.

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

Academic Structure

Accomplishments/Activities

Information on specializations has been compiled and is now being acted upon.
Solutions were found to the various issues associated with grades migration.
Thurlow and otehrs have devised a model for handling Independent Study coursework. Thanks to Anne Klingen for help with configuration and data entry.
Thanks for Shannon Lovejoy (Liberal Arts) for help with data entry of deleted programs.
Two new customer relationships have been implemented to represent suspended and inactive programs.

Project Plan Status

Tasks Behind Schedule

New Issues

Action Items

Major Activities Planned for Next Two Weeks

Student Administration

Accomplishments/Activities

On Monday, February 24, 5,000 new students will be migrated from legacy to campus management. An all day test is scheduled for either Wednesday, February 26 or Friday, February 28.

Jill has begun programming to support various processes within campus management, ie. set/remove developmental status indicator.

Charlotte, Denise, Onice, Pam, and Joe participated in a test on booking. If we go live in March 03, the Registrar's Office will need to process all registrations (except for student self-service over the web). This decision has been made for several reasons, but primarily, because of the confusing error messages displayed and conflicting information display during transactions.

A preliminary meeting was held to discuss correspondence issues and the needs of end-users.

Denise and Charlotte have been cleaning up error reports of TT (transcript) and ET (enrollment) records.

Project Plan Status

Tasks Behind Schedule

New Issues

Action Items

Major Activities Planned for Next Two Weeks

Development in CM will continue.
Programming in CM will continue.
Testing of migrated data will be conducted on Wednesday and/or Friday (Feb. 26/28).
Onice, Suzanne, and Charlotte will work this weekend to test authorizations in the student file.

Student Accounting

Accomplishments/Activities

1).We have been testing Cash Journal and have encountered the following issues:

A). On 02/19/2003 when attempting to post a withdrawal from Cash Desk M, the following error message was displayed, Post on Account: Post on Account Flag must be Set; therefore, we were unable to post the withdrawal.

B). The system assigns multiple lots to transactions posted on the same reconciliation key. For example, in one instance there are nine CP lots, five CS lots, and two CH lots. Ideally there should be one lot for credit card payments, one lot for cash transactions, one lot for check payments, one lot for check disbursements.

C). On the Display Day-End Closing Screen, when the "Closing Reprint" icon is activated an error message is displayed and the printing does not occur.

D).. When posting an outgoing check payment in Cash Journal, the amount of the check is deducted from the Check lot making end-of-day balancing complicated. As an example, if a teller takes in three check payments on account that total $500, and the teller also processes one out-going check for $100, the check lot shows that the teller should have $400 in his/her check lot.

E). If the teller manually enters a reconciliation key and completely exits from the FPCJ transaction without out closing out the reconciliation key, when she enters to continue processing transactions in FPCJ, the system assigns a new reconciliation key. This does not occur if the teller accepts the reconciliation key that the system proposes.

2).Cash Journal training for the Bursar tellers will begin next week.

3).We have made significant progress on the format of the monthly billing statement.

4).The format of the receipt that the system will produce for the processing of the Cash Journal transactions has been finalized. We are also happy to report that the receipt will print on our current teller receipt machines.

5).Work continues on the testing of the fee assessment program.

6).A decision was made on the handling of the fee distribution of housing revenue. In CM all revenue will be posted to a Housing Office profit center. It will be up to Physical Plant, Telecommunications and Housing to work out a suitable arrangement for the payment of any services that Physical Plant and Telecommunications render to the Housing Office. In legacy, the fee distribution program handled the distribution of fees to PPD and Telecommunications based on a complex formula that was cumbersome to maintain. We feel that CM fee distribution does not need to be burdened with this calculation, when an easier solution is available.

Project Plan Status

Tasks Behind Schedule

New Issues

Action Items

Major Activities Planned for Next Two Weeks

CM Reporting

Accomplishments/Activities

The FOCUS file fields for the Law School extract have been mapped and the program to convert has been started.

Donna is making good progress on the admissions logical database, and Kathy has created the selection method for Orientation.

NOTE: If the structure of the ldb contains more than one parallel node, we can no longer use ALV (which is the tool which allows for easy export to Excel). This discovery impacted the design of the ldb.

The COR10 report (showing all sections and enrollment) is available in QAS and will be in PRD Monday to facilitate checking the migrated course data.

Project Plan Status

Tasks Behind Schedule

New Issues

Action Items

Major Activities Planned for Next Two Weeks

Web / Interfaces

Accomplishments/Activities

Project Plan Status

Tasks Behind Schedule

New Issues

Action Items

Test graduate admissions scenarios.
Finish configuration of undergraduate admissions and finish workflow.
Make changes to law application.
Modify program to update email address when studetn accounts are created.

Major Activities Planned for Next Two Weeks

Re-test Law admissions after changes.
Test Undergraduate admissions.
Finish coding for document manager.
Investigate Biller Durect (Aitala)
Complete advisor/student info web interfaces (Gates)
Revisit grading interfaces (Gates)