Information Technology (IT)
Enterprise Applications Services (EAS)
Status Reports
Student Administration - April 2005
Melissa Whalen and Hairong Greenwell attended the annual Higher Education User Group (HEUG) conference since our last report. The SA team continues to use the information sharing resources that HEUG provides to its member institutions both from the list serve questions posed to the code sharing that other institutions post to the web site.
We also said good-bye this month to our two Cedar Group functional consultants that have been on-site in the UMR Registrar and Cashier offices for the last several months as well as our IBM Technical consultant Chris Marshall who has been with us since just prior to the UMR Records go-live.
Admissions (People Soft UMR, UMKC, UMSL)
- Identify and fix problems with the High School transcript load process and the calculation of the HS core course gpa, including updating gpa's that had initially been set to 0.
- Make changes to the External application and prospect load processes, including reapplying mods due to PS patch released in Bundle 7.
- Phase III of the Web Application for Admissions changes were moved to production. Still making changes to the UMSL Optometry and UMKC Professional Medical web apps.
- Implemented the ability to purge old unprocessed applications.
Student Records/Student Financials (People Soft – UMR)
- Investigate reported problem with parental credit card payments charging their cards but not crediting the students' accounts.
- Lots of changes and testing as a result of the Finance 8.8 upgrade as they related to the GL interface and the AP Refunds process.
- Completed more census related reports, spent time 'sanity checking' the numbers with UM and UMR IR staff. Added separate fields to the census extract to distinguish between high school transcript work and college transcript work when students had both as a first time student or first time transfer student. Added more audit trail messages to help identify what appear to be credit hour errors when they aren't really errors! ((o credit hour courses, COOP classes, etc.)
- Lots of activity related to the setup and testing of Resource 25 (room scheduling software) for UMR's new student center as well as classroom setup. Cross campus work groups have been meeting and on-site user training is scheduled for May in Rolla.
- Continue with implementation of DARWIN. Working now on getting student course data converted into DARWIN format. Completed the interactive audit portion of DARSWEB, began internal testing of mods we needed, advisor and student functions are working correctly in our testing; Now working on the student and advisor login authentication process and any potential security issues.
- Work in progress on the data export necessary to feed the NCAA Compliant Assistance Software provided by NCAA.
- Miscellaneous clearinghouse reporting issues, clarified the issue of whether to use session withdraw or term withdraw to accurately get students who withdraw from classes reported to the clearing house.
- Resolve several print issues related to mid-term student grade reports and class rosters. This included reduction in size of the print file by converting to using a formdef within PS and procedural changes (for now) on how to print multiple copies.
- Reports: In progress or completed additions or corrections to various reports including SAM to SF discrepancies, Degree Frequency, Transfer Evaluation, Enrollment History Certification letters, Deficient Students report and several daily balancing reports for Cashiers.
- Many fixes, changes and analysis related to transfer credit processing. Received fixes from PeopleSoft for some and implemented UM changes for others. Also significantly reduced the number of students who had conversion holds placed on their records as a safety measure until transfer credit and gpa issues could be reviewed and resolved. Because this is now down to a manual process, it has been a slow process.
- Implemented automated process for doing address cleansing on a weekly basis using a date range
Student Records/Student Accounts Receivable (Legacy SIS/CSAR/SAM)
- Testing changes necessary to the refunds process in CSAR to support the new loan system (CLM) changes.
- Completed changes to the new program USSA1000 which is a replacement for the ARTX70 and Windstar reporting on 1042S.
- Support for Finance upgrade to 8.8; had to modify 10+ programs and processes to accommodate the changes, lots of testing.
- Our 1098T file was rejected by the IRS due to negative amounts being reported in fee reductions. After review of the IRS documentation and consultation with the Cashiers and U-Hall with our outside auditors, corrections were and are being made to the affected students' forms. Corrected forms will be issued and a new file sent to the IRS.
The Housing Director (HD)
- Work with DBA to finally clear up longstanding UMKC printing problem with newly installed printer.
Work with DBA to setup regularly scheduled stop/restart of Data Interface Module (DIM) in an attempt to clear up longstanding export/import scheduling problems; to date, this solution seems to be working; DIM monitoring continues.
- Request access for HOUSINGFEEDER id to UM data warehouse tables that either contain MU ResLife data or contain data needed by MU ResLife.
- Investigate UMR report of a room that HD indicates is assigned when it is not; discover and delete invalid room usage indicator value.
- Move to Production the upgraded version of HD (3.1.3013) that has been in Test for the last month; make arrangements with DBAs to log off users still using product and to run database upgrade scripts.
- Participate in weekly meetings to plan for MU's move to HD for the 2006 time periods.
- Investigate report by UMR campus that dining plan cancellations were not prorating correctly; modify some entries in Meal Plan Change proration table. UMR reports that problem is still occurring on an intermittent basis; forward information to vendor and report as error (MAR05 #2); provide additional procedural information and extracted table data to vendor when problem reoccurs.
- Provide overview to Admissions programmer of the use of DORM addresses in PeopleSoft.
- Provide information to MU's programmer about fields that will be needed in MU's external lookup file (external lookup file will be used to access ApplicationSendDate information); provide feedback concerning data display and control card format.
- Investigate UMR data need to determine reapplication incentives and reapplication dodgers; determine best way to obtain data from two different timeframes; writeup instructions and forward to client.
- Send note to vendor inquiring how to import custom floor and bed features into HD; indicate in further correspondence that we will need this ability to import MU's custom attribute data.
- Investigate UMKC students with missing majors; UMKC Registrar indicates, for students not yet eligible to register, that we should get major from the student's degree data; write up specifications for modification to SIS student data feed program (USRL1001).
- Writeup specifications for conversion of MU's hall/room/bed data.
- Prepare for and conduct April 2005 Residential Life User Group meeting.
- Investigate inability to connect to any HD instance using SQL Navigator; problem caused by incorrect entries in the shared tnsnames file; provide correct information to EAS DBAs so file could be corrected.
- Investigate $300 UMKC Fall 2005 ResLife first payment for student that had not submitted application; Cashiers office applied credit to an incorrect timeframe.
Legacy ResLife
- Modify USSRN03 job to create batches acceptable to UARDA10 program.
- Request that PHONE_NUMBER field be redefined in UMDW data tables to match legacy SIS data format.
- Writeup specifications for modifications to USSRM85 program (moves students' learning community choices from SFUSER26 segment to ResLife contract segment) to use SSRL25 file as the driver; program modified and moved to production.
- Modify USSRL19 program (creates assignment segments from tentative assignments) to check System Table 87 for room rate code to correct problem with suite-style rooms not having correct rate code.
- Write new program to identify students with FIGs in their learning community requests that do not have corresponding Summer Welcome 'FIG ##' record; setup proc and move new program to production.
