Information Technology (IT)
Enterprise Applications Services (EAS)
Status Reports
Student Administration - March 2005
We welcome Ron Murphy as the newest member of the Student Administration team. While he started out as a ‘local’ (Hickman and MU grad), he’s spent the last 17 years in Oklahoma so we welcome him back to the Columbia area. He has been assigned to work on the DARS/DARWIN effort with Herman Harrison.
Five members of the SA team attended a 5-day PeopleSoft on-site training course in PeopleCode. Feedback confirmed the class was excellent and in the first week back, several folks were able to get some old tasks off our list by using some of the tips and techniques learned in the class.
Admissions (People Soft UMR, UMKC, UMSL)
- Implemented change to allow some components to default to Update/Display All so all data displays without having to remember to go look. Will cut down on duplicates and data entry effort.
- Fixed problem related to High School. Core calculation when there were no credit courses transcripted
- Completed and implemented Phase II for Application loads.
- Continue testing of the UMSL Optometry Web Application and the UMKC Professional Medication Web App
- Added additional fields to Rolla Prospect and Applicant Summary Pages. Initial feedback shows the new pages are very useful and well received.
Student Records/Student Financials (People Soft – UMR)
- Assisted UMR as needed with setup issues related to Resource 25 room scheduling. Reviewed Ad Astra’s product description more thoroughly.
- Continue to make academic structure changes as they come in; modified the primary and active program views to solve a PS query problem.
- Continue validating data on many of the compliance reports such as Census Enrollment, DHE and EMSAS reports in conjunction with UMR IR and UM IR staff. Fix data problems that the reports uncover.
- Working on software upgrade to the Touchnet Payment Gateway (TPG)
- Made significant progress in validating Student Financials daily balancing reports
- Several modifications related to grades – fixed bug in grade roster, changed the way the UMR logo prints on grade reports to reduce the print file size and for printing grade reports directly to a printer
- Completed process to allow for setting the minimum units required on athletes
- Modified degree audit (DARS) driver to replace UMDW data warehouse tables with PS tables; made changes to allow for a degree audit to be produced on non-matriculated students; working on conversion program to load student related data into DARWIN tables, spent a day with UMSL DARS and IT staff discussing their DARWIN implementation.
- Continuing to make enhancements and corrections to the transfer credit process. Fixed 539 catalog entries which corrected over 5,000 transcripted transfer credit courses that were pointing to inactive courses. Added edits to make some fields required at entry time to save the pain later! Completed mods to the Transfer Evaluation Report;
- Sat in on round table discussion UMR Cashiers hosted with some of their students and parents to gather their feedback on PS Self Service
- Implemented academic action inquiry for students in self service
- Doing a lot of testing with Finance team on the SF to GL feeds as well as CSAR to AP feeds in preparation for Finance’s move to Version 8.8
- Made changes in the way distance education fees are determined, should simply the process
Student Records/Student Accounts Receivable (Legacy SIS/CSAR/SAM)
- Added option to Appointment time program to process students even if they have a class.
- Started work on Accounts Receivable changes for the new Loan Management System (CLMS)
- Continue working on NCAA data export process, check on NSLC Clearinghouse problems
- Received 2nd general release of next aid year software from Sigma
- Several CICS/RACF userid and security changes; researched problem with employee losing access when going from active to retired status;
The Housing Director (THD)
- Consult with several other members of programming staff to decide best way to synch DORM and LOC addresses for the UMR campus; writeup specifications for modifications to USRL1100/1105/1110 to allow for creation and deletion of LOC addresses that will match DORM addresses for UMR ResLife students.
- Create two new reports for UMKC campus that will help them compare numbers of applications received between this year and last year.
- Investigate posting of ResLife first payments on UMR campus; discuss process with Cashiers and ResLife office to determine how best to handle this transaction; writeup specifications for modifications to USRL1010 to allow credit/credit reversals and to accommodate new automatic group post process.
- Install latest version (3.1.3008) of The Housing Director in all Test instances; email campuses that they should test the new version; download and unzip new THD executable (3.1.3013) and database update script from vendor; ask DBA to apply database update script and field redefinition to UMKC Test instance; install new .exe in UMKC Test instance and conduct initial testing; ask DBA to perform same activities to the other three Test instances; send email to all users detailing problems addressed in the new version and asking them to test. .
- Ask vendor for information on how to populate data associated with "Timeframes in ResLife" fields; import UMR legacy data into "Prior to THD" field; provide UMR client with steps to take to populate "In THD" field.
- Ask vendor for information on how to rollover student groups from Fall to Winter timeframes.
- Work with UMR client to identify students who can be deleted from THD (those who were sent an application but never returned it).
- Contact vendor about error FEB05 #1 (criteria referring to ApplicationReceived field is lost when report is saved).
- Recontact vendor about error JAN04 #3 (negative sign does not display on reports generated in Reports > Students nor in exported data) asking whether any progress had been made towards resolution; vendor recommends redefining field as float.
- Meet with MU ResLife to plan for THD implementation; work with MU's new programmer (Vasavi Yeleti) to help her get a jump start on the MU implementation project.
- Work with UMR to investigate use of THD to track students who live in fraternities/sororities; email vendor inquiring if there is anyway to define more than 26 beds in a room if the user has chosen the alpha bed designator (current version works it way through the upper case alphabet, then some special characters, then the lower case alphabet, then some more special characters, and then crashes after creating 64 beds as it does not have any additional bed characters to use); vendor will modify program to create beds A-Z, then AA-AZ, then AAA-AAZ, etc.
- Investigate, document, and report FEB05 #2 error (THD does not allow you to save roommate information for more than one timeframe).
- Investigate, document, and report FEB05 #3 error (THD does not initialize fields associated with TimeFrames Living on Campus when creating new students); query data to find all new students with suspect timeframe data; correct data and notify client.
- Investigate report by UMR of inability to enter preference or custom attribute data for new students; attempt to rebuild custom attributes table and receive error message about improperly quoted string; discover new custom attribute with apostrophe in name; cleanup several custom attribute names that contain potentially problematic characters; successfully rebuild custom attributes table; send email to client detailing characters to avoid when creating new custom attributes.
- Investigate report by UMR of error when running saved report; saved report contained custom attribute that had been renamed; modify report and save; notify client about this additional impact of renaming custom attributes.
Legacy ResLife
- Investigate extracting assignment data (1993-2003) to create a spreadsheet that UMR could use when responding to background inquiries.
- Extract and save data for all currently assigned RY2005 single rooms in case single assignment data is overwritten during ROAR processing as happened last year.
- Finalized table changes to allow for 4 Quiet House selections.
