IT Services will be doing some prep work for having Banner 9 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) this weekend during our Banner upgrade defined window. If you are working in Banner 9 between 12:01 am – 10 am Sunday morning, June 23, you may experience a brief outage. This won’t affect any automated jobs running in the background.
Category Archives: Planning
November 14 Update
Here is the latest update from the Banner 9 project.
All seven of the Admin modules have been completed and are in Production. Only two of those modules are also running Banner 8 (General and Student). EMSS has agreed to disable access to the Student and General modules (with the exception of one or two forms) on the weekend of December 8/9.
The Application Navigator was upgraded to version 3 in PROD on November 11. This relocates the menus and makes other light interface changes.
For the Self-Service modules, work is continuing on the pieces that are available from Ellucian.
- General Event Management – Is installed and configured in DEVL and TEST, but a couple of bugs are preventing it from being moved to PROD.
- Journal Voucher – Betta kickoff began on August 21 and testing continues in DEVL and TEST.
The work on disaster recovery is continuing, with the Go Live date more than likely occurring sometime in January 2019.
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.
- Workshop: Banner 9 Finance Basic Navigation
- Workshop Code: BAN9FINNAV
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
Banner 9 Go Live Dashboard
Dashboard updated 8/3/2017
Update: 7/17
These Banner 9 modules have been created in Test
- General
- Advancement
- Student
- Banner Document Management System (resolving issues)
- Accounts Receivable (in progress)
Production environment hardware installation should be complete today – 7/14. Software prep will begin next week.
Current activities:
Advancement
- Installed Advancement, BDMS, General, Student (baseline) modules
- Testing/Training consultant starts on Monday, 7/17
- Go Live scheduled for week of 9/11/2017
Financial Aid
- Interviewing consultant now – start date around August 1
- Go Live in either October or November
- Mod re-engineering
- Initial results look positive
4 mods have been or are in the process of being worked on
Developers are testing an application builder that may significantly reduce the time required to build some mods/standalone forms
Ethos Workflow evaluation and Integration Hub work continue
Scheduling conference calls with Ellucian Subject Matter Experts for each area to discuss mods vs baseline, new features in Banner 9 we could take advantage of, etc
Wading through the mods and forms
Over the past 18 years, we have generated lots of ways to make Banner give us the information we want in the format we want. Some of those have been created via Banner mods (modifications – see Glossary) and some via Oracle forms. Because Banner 9 is so different, we need to be sure any needed mods or forms will work the way we expect – and that may mean rewriting.
The project team tackled the mods first – business office team members leading the discussions. Here is what we found:
| Keep: Will Require Project Resources | Keep: No Update Needed | Other | Retire | Totals | |
| Advancement | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| Financial Aid | 1 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 5 |
| Finance | 2 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 5 |
| General | 1 | 28 | 1 | 6 | 16 |
| HR | 7 | 4 | 1 | 6 | 18 |
| Student | 12 | 13 | 1 | 14 | 40 |
| Bursar | 4 | 7 | 0 | 2 | 13 |
| Grand Total | 27 | 38 | 3 | 31 | 99 |
Currently, the teams are looking at the 130 plus Oracle forms that will need attention. Like the mods, the approach will be first to determine who owns or uses the form, is it still needed, and, if needed, what is the estimated cost of rewriting. Watch for more info on Banner forms soon!
Plan for the Journey: March 27
Program manager, Frank Pahlke, was onsite the week of 3/27 and the core team focused on lots of project logistics. Here are some of the highlights:
- Presented draft project charter to the Implementation Committee at its regular meeting.
- Continued to plan training on the Ellucian Extension tool for IT Services developers.
- High-level project timeline being broken down into more granular plans.
- Mods are being reviewed by staff who use them and by IT developers. Each will be rated by its future state: retire, keep as is, or keep but rewrite. The core team is engaging Ellucian to review all mods that are to be kept to ensure plans align with best practices.
- The project core team moved to their new project space in Boyd Hall.