Campus Management Status Report ~ 09-29-2002

Overview

The three admissions teams led by Jill Stribling, William Oliphant, Larry Ridgeway, and Maurice Eftink completed their work in defining the admissions process flows in preparation for Bodo von Glahn's visit. These materials were forwarded to CM development on 9/23.
A new proposal on printing is ready for review by the campus -- see www.olemiss.edu/projects/first/cm/recommendations/printing.pdf. Comments are requested by 10/11.
We are continuing to push hard on data migration. McCready is working with the systems group to define the database layout and schema for the Oracle staging area. Hankins is working on the extract of student data from the legacy system, and Ko is working on the companion program to call the create student BAPI.
Several team members will be attending EDUCAUSE 2002 the week of 10/1. Hale and Gates will make a presentation on UM's Campus Management implementation, and Ferguson, Gates and Mantena will participate in a poster session in which they will describe some of their recent XML/XSL projects, including the financial aid award look up.
M.K. Smith will be doing some writing for the CM project. We are planning a simple newsletter (one page front and back) that will be issued about every 6 weeks. We will also make this information available on the web. The goal is to take all of this very complex material and present it in a way that is meaningful to typical students, faculty members, and staff to begin preparing them for the upcoming changes.

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

Academic Structure

Accomplishments/Activities

Jim and Charlotte are making progress on booking rules.
Jim is following up on missing degree programs (26 of 66 have been received).
IT will be making the academic program curriculum changes that have occurred since December 2001. (Thanks to Denise Knighton for providing the minutes to check what needs to be added to CM.)
We have discovered that the ENGS courses and paralegal were never entered and need to address this.
Jim and Veena are finalizing the e-forms for course approvals.
Jim has finalized the event type categories and delivery modes to support IHL reporting requirements.
The building and room prototype is close to being completed, and very soon we will be able to go ahead and migrate that data.
Technical staff members have developed programs to set specific data fields (capacities, event types, etc.) to support the recent decisions in these areas.

Project Plan Status

Tasks Behind Schedule

New Issues

Action Items

Major Activities Planned for Next Two Weeks

We still need to resolve the one- directional co-requisite issue; specifically, we need to set up a customer-defined relationship.
We plan to have a proposal describing the event planning strategy in about a week. It addresses the overall model, naming conventions, and related issues. These decisions will impact on booking and grading.

Student Administration

Accomplishments/Activities

Jill Stribling and Jason Ferguson worked with undergraduate, graduate, and law admissions teams to define their processes. Complete documentation of the work processes was sent to Germany (particularly for use in development) on Monday, September 23.
Linda Bailey has been documenting student master configuration in the "sandbox". This documentation will be reviewed/approved, and will become the basis for the configuration of DEV which will begin in the next few days.
Jill Stribling has been working on solutions to missing attributes in CM. Linda Bailey has started to set up test customer infotypes in the sandbox.
Charlotte Fant and Jim Vaugh have made recommendations on the appropriate use of footnotes to be used in event planning.
The on-line grade submission proposal is being finalized.
The student administration team saw a demo of the student prototype with as much customization as we believe necessary.
Ross Hankins has been working with others to map legacy data fields to appropriate fields within CM.
Advising team led by Charlie Gates is finalizing the proposal for advising, with specific recommendations on the setting and removing of holds.

Project Plan Status

Tasks Behind Schedule

New Issues

Action Items

Major Activities Planned for Next Two Weeks

Denise Knighton will enter and edit course information into CM.
Charlotte, Jill, Jason, and Jack will meet to finalize the policy for updating, defaulting, and/or deactivating addresses within CM.
Jill, Charlotte, and Cathey Morrisson will meet to finalize some admissions policy decisions.
Prepare for visit from Bodo Von Glahn from SAP. Jason Ferguson will be conducting a mini-training session of ISR for those IT staff members who will be working with Bodo.
Design recruiting solution.
Develop a strategy for communicating student ID numbers to students brought over from legacy.
Finalize orientation (TEM) solution, finish configuration for prototype, and get approval.
Design a process for external signoff of admissions rules for new processes in CM.

Student Accounting

Accomplishments/Activities

Fees
The team made progress with the fee calculation. All fee categories have been set up and tested successfully for a single semester as well as concurrent semesters. The testing was done using the SAP Fee Test Tool which calculates fees based on simulated master and booking data.
The next step is to calculate fees from the student file using actual CM data and interpreting the relationships to the academic calendar, modules and organizational units. For that purpose, Kay is setting up a spreadsheet to identify as many test scenarios as possible and the test data to support these scenarios.
Interfaces
Buster is finalizing the interface to post employee charges for services to Payroll. Telecom will be used as the test case. Other interfaces will follow. DEV has been configured with the minimum required to allow acceptance testing.
Cash at Desk
After we received a couple of fixes from SAP, posting at cash desk is now working. We were able to set up a cash operation, assign cashiers to cash desks, open cash desks, deposit money, post payments with automatic clearing, make payments on account, withdraw funds from the desks, perform the end-of-day-activity, and finally, close the desks. Using a SAP delivered correspondence type, Maria managed to print receipts for incoming payments. To date, we have looked for major gaps. SAP's cash desk doesn't work exactly like CORE and it certainly doesn't look like CORE but it appears to provide the necessary cash desk functions for cash handling.
The next step is to confirm the functionality for check handling. It was agreed that Cash Desk does not have to deal with the check production of payroll advances.
A concept for departmental deposit has been discussed and simulated. Unfortunately, SAP has to enhance the request screen (FM specific event 6500) before the proposal can be finalized. We are supposed to get the enhancements in about 2 weeks.
Accounting Processes
We have tested 'Account Maintenance' which is the term used for clearing open items against payments. SAP provides manually initiated clearing for a single business partner and automatic clearing as mass activity. Both programs use the same rule, e.g. clear the oldest open item first. The tests resulted in some good examples of splitting documents. This is a neat concept but takes some getting used to. We need to pay attention to this when training accounting staff.
Invoicing
We started to test invoicing which requires an 'Invoice Type' on the contract account. It appears that SAP failed to include 'Invoice Type' in the configuration of Student as Business Partner. SAP has been notified. Maria is currently trying to activate the correspondence for Public Sector billing to see what it looks like.
FSCM Biller Direct
SAP delivered the web version of invoicing and payment, FSCM Biller Direct, which has been installed in the past weeks. The necessary preparatory configuration steps have been done in R/3 Contract Accounting and on the web side, too.
Financial Aid
Work has started on prototyping grant master data and posting disbursement documents which required a fix from Walldorf. The process is working and results in 2 documents; one for the student and one for the sponsor. The FM objects are correctly derived from the grant master. Unfortunately, the CO objects and Business Area are missing from both documents and also from the Interface specifications.
Conversion
In the past few weeks, a lot of e-mails crossed the Atlantic to discuss how to bring open balances/items from the legacy system into Contract Accounting without getting Funds Management and Controlling out of balance. We have settled on an approach and UM has to decide to convert the open balance or individual open items.

Project Plan Status

Tasks Behind Schedule

New Issues

Action Items

Major Activities Planned for Next Two Weeks

CM Reporting

Accomplishments/Activities

Spreadsheet updated based on September 12th meeting.
Course Offering programs reviewed.
Reporting Strategy recommendation developed. Subgroup met September 24, 2002, with Kathy, Rick, and Jill concerning spreadsheet and recommendation. Recommendation finalized and presented to team leads.

Project Plan Status

Tasks Behind Schedule

New Issues

Action Items

Major Activities Planned for Next Two Weeks

Denise and Brenda will review the Priority 1,2, and 4 reports (mandated, high and medium priority).
Brainstorming meeting scheduled for September 30, 2002.

Web / Interfaces

Accomplishments/Activities

Work is being done on the HTML pages of web registration to demo to students. The technical design of web registration is mostly done.
Development has begun on the address update portion of web registration.
Modifications to the e-forms for course maintenance have been done.
Attended a meeting with the advising committee to hear discussions about what information/services needs to be available to advisors via the web.
Successfuly created a student using the new address structures in ISR.
Some progress is being made by the Basis team and student accounting team on installation/configuration of Biller Direct

Project Plan Status

Tasks Behind Schedule

New Issues

How to handle displaying cross listed courses on the web course schedule.
Decide how to handle student address updates via the web(i.e. keeping old addresses)

Action Items

Finish web registration demo screens.
Begin asthetic and technical design for grading(appraisals) via the web.

Major Activities Planned for Next Two Weeks

Continue preparations for Bodo's visit next month.
Continue development of web registration.
If installation/configuration of Biller Direct is finished, begin evaluating, modifying, and testing.

Organizational Readiness

Accomplishments/Activities

Project Plan Status

Tasks Behind Schedule

New Issues

Action Items

Major Activities Planned for Next Two Weeks

Technology Infrastructure

Accomplishments/Activities

HR SP 51-54
R/3 SP 33-34
BASIS SP 34-35
Application Interface SP 34-35

HR Public Sector (HRPS) Patch 12, 13
Campus Management Patches 5, 6

BSI TUBs 150-160

The next upgrade cycle will start 10/18 on DEV. CRT 7 will be included with this cycle.

Work continues on Biller Direct.

The server that will be used as part of the data exchange infrastructure has been installed. Information is being collected in regard to data types, sizes, formats, and structures before the completion of file system and database setup.