Category Archives: News

Banner 9 Project Reaches Key Milestone

As of June 14, all of the Banner 9 Admin modules were being used in production. The last to go live was Student. So, even though the project has slowed down a bit, progress is continuing to be made both within IT Services and the various administrative offices.

Cake with white frosting and the words Miami Charts a Course for Banner 9

HR Banner 9 Celebration Cake

On June 1, Human Resources joined Finance (internal use) as the first two modules to move to exclusively using Banner 9. Banner 8 Finance for external users will be going away on Sept. 30. The cutoff dates for the rest of the Banner 8 modules are as follows:

  • Advancement: August 1
  • Financial Aid: September 15
  • Accounts Receivable: September 15
  • Student: December 31

As can be expected from the fact that Banner 8 is beginning to be eliminated, the Banner 9 adoption rate is growing rapidly. As of July 25, Finance (internal) and Human Resources were at 100%. The rest of the adoption rates can be seen below:

  • Financial Aid: 95%
  • Advancement: 93%
  • Accounts Receivable: 86%
  • Finance (external): 78%
  • Student: 47%

    Banner 9 Finance team including Priya Kodeboina, Mike Beck, Soundar Rajendran, David Shaefer and Quang Do

    Some of the Banner 9 Finance implementation team

 

The next major focus for the project team is the Self-Service modules. One area, Finance, is complete, but the others have a lot of work yet to go. For example, IT Services is currently working with Advancement on configuring and installing the General Event Management module.

 

Progress on the other Self-Service modules is mostly in a holding pattern.

  • Advancement: No Self-Service module available
  • Finance: To be installed in production sometime in October
  • Human Resources: Currently on hold
  • Student Registration: If accepted after testing, would go into production February, 2019
  • Accounts Receivable: Not available until 2019
  • Financial Aid: Not available until 2019
  • Attendance Tracking: Will be tested, but no plan to implement
  • Faculty Grade Entry: If accepted after testing, would go into production February, 2019
  • Student: If accepted after testing, would go into production February, 2019
  • Banner Student Advising: If accepted after testing, would go into production February, 2019

Please check MiamiOH.edu/Banner9 for project updates when they become available.

Banner 9 Finance: A message for all users

By Sarah Persinger, Controller’s Office

As you may know, the entire Banner system is being upgraded to a new look and feel with version 9. The Finance portion of the upgrade is scheduled for complete conversion for all campus users by 10/1/2018.

The upgrade for Finance is rolling out in two phases. The first phase is live and consists of central Finance and Business Services office staff who officially cut over to the new version on 5/1 and were actively engaged in testing the upgrade from January to April. Also in this first phase is the Banner 9 Finance Test Pilot group, volunteers providing the valuable perspective of departmental users during our financial system testing and upgrade work. The significant change is to the look and feel of Banner Finance. The keystroke and navigation steps in version 9 are different than you have become accustomed to with Banner 8 and previous versions.

The second phase of the project is for the distributed Banner Finance system users across all campus locations and offices. This phase has a cut over date of 10/1 to alleviate any schedule compression due to May graduation, summer semester, or the start of the new academic year. An early preview of the new version of Banner Finance is available for those who might want to start using the upgraded version sooner than October. We encourage this and want to share with you the appropriate training materials and methods available for your learning experience.

Navigation Video and Online Materials

The navigation video is located in the Canvas course “Banner 9 Finance”. The full Canvas course itself is currently under construction, though access to the 11-minute navigation video is available now if you should want to view it before training.

Banner 9 Finance training sessions

This workshop is scheduled in TRAIN with multiple sessions planned between July and September for all campus locations. You are encouraged to sign up for training well in advance of the 10/1/18 conversion date so that you have time to learn the new look and feel of Banner 9 Finance and get accustomed to the changes.

The comprehensive Banner 9 upgrade project (all modules) is discussed in the Banner 9 website, if you want to read more about this project and the team leads for each module.

Central Finance and Business Services offices:

  • Accounts Payable
  • Budget Office
  • Controller’s Office
  • General Accounting
  • Grants Accounting
  • Purchasing
  • Treasury Services

February 16, 2018 Update

News of Note:

One of the things that is being considered is to have a cut-off date for using Banner 8 once a Banner 9 administrative module goes live.

The HR consultant will be on-site the week of Feb. 27.

Both Advancement and Financial Aid administrative modules have successfully transitioned to Banner 9.

University Registrar will provide Student module training for staff who have access to modify course schedule and student schedule.  This will occur near or post migration.  Again reminding all that this is to be accomplished through sharing of SOPs and will NOT include general Banner 9 navigation training.

Work completed:

  • Consultant for Finance module has been working with the team both on-site and remotely.
  • Navigation training of Student module for Registrar’s office was completed in January.

Plans for next reporting period (approximately two weeks):

  • Continue to review usability concerns with two Financial Aid forms.
  • The Finance training plan is being finalized with training scheduled to begin on Feb. 12.
  • Working with Ellucian on accessibility issues of SSB module.
  • HR testing is scheduled to begin Feb. 1 and continue into April. Training is scheduled for the final week of Feb.
  • Testing and updating documentation for Student module is ongoing and scheduled to last through the end of April 2018.
  • Student module for Admissions, Graduate School and Regionals is currently developing testing/training plans with help of an on-site consultant.

Upcoming Banner 9 Implementations:

  • The HR go-live date is now scheduled for May 18, 2018.
  • AR implementation will continue with testing and training of users through early April, with a go-live date scheduled for the week of April 10.
  • Finance module scheduled to go live in April 2018.
  • Student module scheduled to go live June 2018. (u.achieve users go live in Nov.)

Banner 9 project continues on course to success

The Banner 9 implementation project is continuing on schedule and under budget. There have been a few manageable hiccups along the way, but the project remains on track.

That progress can be seen in some of the milestones on the Administrative portions of Banner 9 that have been completed over the past few months. These include:

  • University Advancement has successfully transitioned to Banner 9.
  • Financial Aid briefly transitioned to Banner 9. As Financial Aid was going live, a major bug was discovered that had not been uncovered during testing. Miami is working with the vendor to implement a fix and Financial Aid plans to complete their transition to Banner 9 in January.
  • A major upgrade to our imaging solution (BDM Xtender) was completed at the end of October. This upgrade was required for the Banner 9 project but affected all users of the imaging system (including those still using Banner 8).
  • High-level Bursar staff completed Accounts Receivable (AR) training the first week of November, and testing has begun. The remainder of the Bursar staff will be trained in March and will transition to Banner 9 shortly thereafter.
  • HR has completed their testing and training plans and will resume work in February (after the end of year processing is complete).
  • From a technical perspective, all Banner 9 administrative modules have now been installed in Production and are waiting for their testing, training, and transition plans to be executed.

Looking forward, Finance will begin developing their testing and training plans in December. Plus, discussions are also beginning for testing and training planning for Registrar and Admissions.

We are also beginning to develop timelines and plans for implementing the Self-Service pieces of Banner 9 (formerly known as BannerWeb). These are the pieces used by the majority of staff, faculty, and students at Miami. Finance Self-Service will be the first of these components to be installed in Spring, 2018. The remaining Self-Service modules will be installed later in 2018 and into 2019.

Banner upgrade scheduled for Thanksgiving weekend

Banner and BannerWeb will be unavailable from 8:00 am Friday, November 24 through 8:00 am on Sunday, November 26. During this time IT Services will be upgrading the Banner PROD database and making API changes. This upgrade is necessary to maintain the Banner 9 modules and provide the latest APIs for data integration between Miami, Ellucian (Banner), and third-party vendor applications.

This outage will not impact the availability of the Canvas learning management system or myMiami; however, Banner data normally displayed in myMiami will not be available, and faculty will not be able to submit grades through Canvas during the outage. Also, because of this upgrade, EM jobs (Control M-Scheduler) will not run November 23-25 but will resume on Sunday, November 26.

If you have questions or concerns regarding this Banner upgrade, please contact the IT Services Support Desk at 513 529-7900 or ITHelp@MiamiOH.edu.

Change to Oracle PROD database password expiration policy

On Friday, November 17 at 10:00 am, a change will be made to the CLIENTS profile in Banner that will affect how it handles password expiration. The main part of the change is that going forward, passwords will now expire in 90 days with no grace period, and no locking of the account. Previously, passwords would expire in 75 days, with a 15 day grace period before the account would be locked.

This change is necessary because Banner 9 does not currently handle the grace period or the account lock. With this change Banner 9 CAS logins will continue to work even if the person’s database password is expired.  When using Banner 8 or other tools (e.g. SQL Developer) the user will get a change password notice on their next login attempt after the password expiration time has been reached.

This change has been tested in the test and development environments.

If you have questions or concerns regarding this change, please contact Kent Covert.

UPDATE: BDM upgrade postponed

The Banner Data Management production deployment originally scheduled for Friday, October 27 at 1 p.m. has been pushed back to a later date.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please contact Dan Johnson at johnsoda@miamioh.edu.

Thank you!

BDM upgrade scheduled for Friday, October 27

Last week, access was granted to the new version of Banner Document Management (BDM 8.7). Here are some updates regarding the testing environment and deployment schedule:

  • The Banner team in IT Services is still working on getting the Print and Export processes up and running. Until these processes are fully functional, you will not be able to print entire documents; instead, you have to do screen prints of the documents. We’re working on getting these processes functional, but we believe that everything else is working in the BDM test environment.
  • Deploying the upgrade into the production environment is the next step. This upgrade will take place on Friday, October 27, at 1 p.m., meaning that BDM will be unavailable from 1 p.m. to around 6 p.m. on Friday.

Please contact Dan Johnson at johnsoda@miamioh.edu with any concerns.

First Banner 9 Modules to Go PROD on 9/1

The word milestone in large red lettersAfter many long months of planning and many long hours of behind-the-scenes work, the Banner 9 project is ready to hit its big first milestone. Four major Banner modules will be installed on their production server on Sept. 1. 

The Banner 9 Advancement, Banner Document Management System (BDMS), General, and Student modules have been tested in the development and test environments and it’s time to make the big step to production status.

Once the modules are installed, Advancement will spend the next ten-day period training and testing.  Advancement staff has been working with a consultant chosen for his specific expertise in this part of the Banner 9 environment. The training and testing will follow plans developed as part of that consultancy, marrying the Banner 9 knowledge with the insight into Miami business processes. This cooperative relationship was designed to result in the best use of the new system and to enable the Advancement staff to be as productive as possible.

The official “go live” date for the Advancement Banner 9 module is Sept. 11 and the team is looking forward to having that first major achievement under their belt. The successes and challenges of this engagement will inform the remaining work.

Next up is Financial Aid. Their consultant is already working with the Miami team, developing training and testing.