Notes from UCO trip – March 3, 2008
Attendees: Kelly Simon, Julie Duncan, Casey Case, Rick Clyburn, Greg Duncan, Jennifer
Bowen, Ninette Carter, Lance Janda, Carol Claiborne, Hillary Ashton, Angela Melton,
Chase Bailey, Linda Phillips, Kelli Peterson, Zoe DuRant, Jennifer Castricone, Frank
Meyers, Cheryl Davis, Kurt Jn Marie, Corlis McPhaul, Donald Hall, Laquita Shaw, Debbie
Goode
General
Julie Duncan:
 They had two project managers: functional and technical
 Took 2 ½ years for migration. Student part came up in March 2002 with registration in
April.
 They are currently in the middle of bringing up ODS and Discover. They had training on
Discover last week and will have ODS training three days this week.
 Housing is on a third-party software called Starezz. (Talked to Casey regarding this and
he had recently been to a conference and spent quite a bit of time talking to this vendor.
It took UCO about a year to bring this up and they will completely on it this May. It
includes a judicial section which he and Jennifer Pruchnicki are interested in. Banner
doesn’t include anything for disciplinary. Housing in Banner only consists of a few
screens and is very basic, thus the need for third-party software. Casey seemed to think
it would probably be a good idea to come up on Banner and then look at Starezz rather
than trying to bring them both up at the same time. He has already had a lengthy
discussion with Pat about no longer using their Access program.)
 “Integrated” basically means you’re passing data files back and forth. It doesn’t
necessarily mean live data. In fact, the data seen on luminis can actually differ at times
from what is in Banner. There is a process you can run periodically to sync these two
back up.
 Addresses: Each migration team (student, HR, housing, alumni, etc) came up with the
different types of addresses they needed. The university wide cohort team then combined
them into one list. They probably had 30 different address types they were tracking which
included hometown, housing address from starezz, diploma address, billing address,
local address, and many, many others.
Rick Clyburn:
 A required first character of the unique identifying number should be carefully considered.
UCO used an * (asterisk), which is a wildcard character and was not a wise decision.
 Regarding the first character of the unique identifying number, they use different
identifiers to designate students, vendors, lenders and employees.
 A set of rules must be established to configure Common Matching Data.
 Each functional area performs training for the campus.
 They use third party software Clean Address by Runner Technologies to maintain proper
address format.
 Jan Douglas is UCO’s sole programmer that worked through the migration and is a
wealth of information. She offered to provide information for extracting data and putting in
Access for miscellaneous claims. She previously gave the same information to Tulsa
Community College. Jan will be a valuable asset to CU’s IT team. She will also be a good
resource/lead for a state-wide Banner users’ group meeting and possibly implementing a
state-wide consortium of Banner reports that are Oklahoma specific.
 UCO has several third party software applications.
 They are using E-Vision (sp?) for printing, where CU purchased e-Print – we may need to
compare the two products
 UCO has very few hard copy purchase orders
 Pcard is the interface used for credit card purchases
Debbie Goode:
 UCO is beginning to use Oracle’s Discoverer for a reporting tool
 UCO started the Banner migration with 4 Sun servers and now have 35

UCO has one FTE for web services; 2 FTE for DBA and trying to hire a third one, but
their salary is too low to attract qualified applicants; 1 Unix system admin; 1 programmer;
2 trainers for all campus-wide training; Banner training by IT is about 30 minutes long and
the functional areas fill in the rest of the story. Each functional area performs in-depth
training for their specific areas. They provide handouts for new employee training, which
takes place every 2 weeks for Timekeepers. They have a training DB on a test system w/
an older data base that has had the data ‘manipulated’ to protect privacy.
 They offered to share a copy of their data entry standards and project definition.
 Functional areas develop their own reports
 If we have a bad trainer, it is very easy to request another
 Students are using the Luminis e-mail and faculty/staff use Lotus Notes. They will more
than likely be moving from Lotus Notes to Exchange, due to the fact they no longer offer
academic pricing and Lotus Notes only offers corporate pricing.
 Managers of functional areas approve requests for access and setup the users. The
auditors are requiring them to separate the duties.
 Clean Address from Runner is invaluable for validating addresses – low cost and
definitely worth the cost.
 Regarding the deletion of duplicate entries of people, they advise against it. Simply flag
the entry and change the name to INVALID. Common matching has helped a lot.
 They generally do not install patches. They keep upgrades current within 6 to 12 months.
 Be sure to hound SGHE for details on steps and scripts for everything they do.
 Within two months after implementation, bring in Banner expert to each functional area
for consulting.
 DO NOT perform any modifications to the software – pay Banner for any mods
 Come up on ver. 8 if at all possible, even if it is beta. The beta sites have been running
since January
 The functional areas found they were working on Banner implementation from 8 to 5 and
doing their regular job from 5 until ??
 E.C. must support that no requests are placed on any departments for the
implementation period.
 Send functional and technical people to Summit. UCO buys a package deal for 15
 They are working on how to do updates without being down – they anticipate being down
for 4 days when they upgrade to ver. 8
 UCO mainly had SGHE trainers on campus. They had some webinar training and they
said it was not as good as having the trainer in person. They thought it might be difficult
to have all the training performed via webinars.
Kelly Simon:
 UCO uses ODS and Access for reporting.
 The users contact Banner when they find problems with the system.
 The ownership of Name and Address can be a multiple office function which will allow
several offices to make changes depending on the rules set up for each office.
 UCO sets up rules to check for duplicates, but they still end up with duplicates in their
system. IT does not delete the duplicates because the records are in so many tables.
Chase Bailey:
 When discussing reporting to outside agencies they put an emphasis on the preparation
and care needed for the UDS process. They also said they could not provide us with any
source code they use for these processes because they did not have rights to it.
 They apply updates to Banner every 6 months to a Year. They have scheduled
downtime for all systems one Sunday every month from 5am - 10am. They said they did
not apply the individual patches (UNLESS it was for FIN AID) that were released every
day, instead they waited for a minor version package to be delivered. Upgrades to
Banner would normally fall outside of the Sunday scheduled downtime and would have to
be performed on holidays, etc.
 They use Procar(sp) for credit card charges. They also said they wrote the necessary
interface.
 They do not have any employees who use a screen reader.


They use cron for job scheduling. They said our Appworx choice is a plus.
Banner Support. They said it really depends on Banners Support responsiveness. They
said different modules had different support individuals who would be better than others
at troubleshooting problems.
 User Setup process. They have setup custom roles in Banner that give the users access
to certain forms (Banner uses Oracle Forms). They suggested setting up our roles based
on the department and maybe even the position if needed. DBA's setup the oracle
account/access.
 Their Banner servers are running on Sun Hardware with Solaris 9 installed. They are
looking to upgrade to Solaris 10. I believe they were using oracle 10. They had 4
physical servers for Banner Databases/application servers. Luminus ran on 5 different
physical boxes but 2 of these boxes were for the Content Mgt. System (CMS) which we
did not purchase. They were using Banner 7.3 and Luminus 3.3. They backup the oracle
databases with RMAN.
 Web Administrator was pleased with the e-mail system provided by Luminus and says
after the initial setup she has not had to bother much with it. She also said the e-mail
admin for the campus was also the e-mail admin for Luminus. They have added many
custom channels to Luminus and indicated this process was fairly straight forward. They
use Active Directory and said Luminus also has an LDAP server that must be installed.
They said they create their Student accounts be setting them up in Banner, then when
the user is being setup in Luminus automatically, it also triggers another process to setup
the students account in Active Directory. They construct the username for students by
first initial of first name, then last name. If they run into conflicts they add numbers to the
end of the username. They also seemed pleased with the integration of Banner and
Luminus.
 One of the DBA's recommended that we hire a full time DBA.
 They urged us to ask Sungard for the Data Entry Standards and the Project Definition
Template.
 In each department they employed one user who was very technically sound with Banner
software so this individual could assist the department with their needs. Each School also
had its own Technician that would assist with PC technical issues.
Linda Phillips:
 Institutional Research was involved in setting up the validation tables.
Greg Duncan:
 UCO is currently running Solaris 9 on their SUN systems and no Sun virtual hosts are
currently in use.
 ODS data updates at UCO will be done nightly. UCO just implementing ODS.
 After ODS is up general reports will come from the ODS.
 UCO uses TouchNet for credit card payments. Instead of UCO paying the high merchant
fees the student is charged an additional fee to pay for the merchant fee. So the
University gets all their payment. Also accept web checks for payment.
 UCO uses the Banner connector for Lotus Notes and also WebCT.
 UCO has been unsuccessful in creating their own custom Banner connector.
 Using Internet Explorer 7 with Banner but have disabled add-ons to IE such as Google
Toolbar.
 UCO does not generate a directory from Banner.
 UCO performs Oracle, Solaris, etc updates once a month on Sunday morning 5am to
10am.
 Longer updates such as Banner that require a Saturday must be approved.
 Not all Banner weekly updates are applied. Major Banner updates from 7.3 to 7.4 are
applied. All financial aid updates are applied.
 UCO does not delete duplicates entries but sets a FLAG on the duplicate entry.
 UCO uses a ProCard for purchases and has written their own interfaces to bring the
information into Banner. Also they do receive a file from credit card company for charges.
 UCO does not have any employees using screen readers. Asked if Banner is

508 compliant. Banner indicates they are but UCO has encountered web pages that are
not. Tickets are turned in on web pages that are not 508 compliant.
 UCO IT is running Banner jobs in UNIX crontab. End users are not using cron jobs.
Some areas run jobs after 5pm and come in early next morning to review the output of
long jobs.
 UCO not currently using OK College Start online application. Using flat files and reentering data in Banner.
 If problems getting Banner to resolve issues UCO goes to their account manager to
escalate.
 The self service does use https but not all items on page are using https.
 Can remotely connect and work with Banner via VPN.
 All reports come out of Institutional Research area.
 UCO has three trainer positions. Trainers give instruction on basic navigation in Banner,
PC Applications etc. Sessions are given in each department on more in depth instruction
on Banner by the department personnel.
 There are two people that work with Luminus.
 There are two DBA's.
 The Help Desk has four people: a manager, two techs that handle the phone calls, one
tech that goes into the field. No students workers are used.
 Each school also has its own tech who is not part of IT and is a first line of support.
 Barbara Anaman banaman@ucok.edu is the UNIX System Admin.
 Corina Rucker crucker@ucok.edu is the Web Administrator for Luminus.
Kurt Jn Marie:
 The university purchased a software package called clean address for making
corrections to addresses in its database. Clean address is configured to run every night
so addresses that are entered incorrectly will be corrected each night.

HR and Payroll data that were migrated from the old system to the new system stated
from the start (the starting date) of the financial year. UCO currently does not have a
standard method of merging data from their previous system and the current system. The
analysts create a report from the old system and a report from the new system, and then
merge the two reports. UCO cautioned that the further back Cameron University can go
in terms of migrating data into the new system from the old system, the better it will be for
Cameron University.

UCO is currently in process of implementing an Operational Data Store (ODS) system.
They will be copying data from the current system into the ODS nightly. Therefore, the
newest data that will exist on the ODS will be one day old.

UCO uses TouchNet for the processing of credit card payments.

TouchNet is also used for the e-billing of students. An e-bill is sent to the students via email each time necessary.

UCO did not use the banner applicant tracking module. UCO uses PeopleAdmin for their
employment tracking system. PeopleAdmin has more features than the banner module.
PeopleAdmin is a separate system from banner. UCO uses Electronic Personnel Action
Form (EPAF) as an interface between Banner and PeopleAdmin.
Applications
Debbie Goode: UCO is using Banner’s application for admission. I said we are using XAP’s
application and they said they would like to do that as well and possibly consider not charging an
application fee. The functional areas say the Banner application is time consuming.
Data Migration
Debbie Goode: It is critical we ask Banner for the scripts and the steps for data migration so we
can perform this for historical data we want migrated.
UCO was able to bring in 7 years of student data and transcripts older than 7 years is stored as
.pdf files. They said if we can convert all of it, to go for it. They migrated 3 years of financial aid
data.
Cheryl Davis: They apparently did A LOT of data entry and said that several APIs were now
available to assist with this. Also, they mentioned “Common Matching” that is now in place to do
some data checking to prevent duplicate data from being entered. They use “Clean Address” by
Runner Technologies to do validation checking on address information.
Chase Bailey: Data migration took about 2 years; they came live in 02 I believe. They used the
traditional implementation so this was fast. Not many IT staff members that were part of the
migration were still on staff currently. They said that the staff in the functional areas and I believe
IT staff had to complete their day to day work after hours. They did not have dedicated staff for
migration. They migrated Student data from 7 years back. Their transcripts from before this were
put in an image format and kept. If an over 7 year old transcript was needed the students data
would have to be manually entered into Banner. They also said that they had to pester Sungard
for the migration scripts and process documentation.
Institutional Research
Julie Duncan: No one from Institutional Research came from Cameron so I spent about twenty or
thirty minutes talking with Cindy Boling, UCO’s Institutional Research Director. They have two
people in this department with a separate assessment area with three people as well as a VP and
a secretary. cboling@ucok.edu – 405-974-3342 www.ucok.edu/ir
Institutional Research is their one stop shop for all surveys and statistics. They do all of the
IPEDS and UDS reporting as well as the Common Data Set and all surveys including Petersons
and U.S. News. This includes all areas of reporting in addition to just student data – HR, facilities
inventory and also financial assistance reports. The departments go to IR for all of their numbers
and IR is considered the final number even over enrollment management. In addition to the
surveys they do a demographics and fact book each semester and maintain yearly information for
the departments called an SSCI. When departments begin to do their five year assessments, all
of the information they need can be found on IR’s website.
Since UCO doesn’t have ODS yet, they have been using object access views. There are several
canned views that come with Banner but they have many custom views that have been created
including one that IR gets its weekly enrollment and demographic data from.
IPEDS – Banner has some canned reports for HR but Cindy didn’t believer that anyone actually
uses these. IR is currently pulling all of the HR data manually since it’s difficult to figure faculty
overload and all of the different ways that people are considered adjunct. They hope at some
point to move to a flat file. The student data they use is basically what they receive from the
Regents. They just review it.
UDS – They worked closely with IT to have this written and have the data pulled from the various
places. IT sends them a large excel file that has some blank columns that IR then fills in. Cindy is
all for sharing this with us as she didn’t see any reason for us to have to rewrite something that is
already written. However, she said to check with Jan Douglas for the program. We would
obviously need to modify it to some degree as we may migrate our data somewhat differently. For
example, there isn’t a place in Banner for Oklahoma required data for tribal information (tribe and
maternal/paternal). She doesn’t know what field they decided to stick this in but we may put it in a
different place. One thing she cautioned about deciding what history to bring over was to make
sure all of the UDS data is converted. Somehow they forgot to convert originating state, county
and city. Six years later, they are still reporting about 15% of the students as unknown for this as
they don’t have the data on these older students.
Debbie Goode: Regarding sharing their coding for UDS and they stated it is not exactly in a
‘shareable’ state. There is more clean-up on their part, as they said it is a work in progress.
Julie Duncan: Census Day data – They have seven object access views that they snapshot this
data from about four times a semester. This data is copied to an MS Access Database. Because
of the amount of data, they are only able to store one semester per database. Some of the
census views she mentioned were: 1) by student – one record per student, 2) by class – one
record per student per class, and 3) gpa records. They do all of their reporting for the surveys
from this data so that all reporting has the same numbers. When she pulls the info into her excel
reports or other reports, she will keep the banner field titles in all caps (STU_ETHNIC) and her
manipulated data field titles in lowercase (inst_fte). This way she is able to quickly identify where
the data originated.
Cohort Data – She indicated about half of the Banner schools are using the cohort management
part in Banner. UCO creates excel files of their cohorts based on the census files and then
comparing them to the UDS info (which should be the same.) The final cohort is saved each
semester. Then they do queries against those students typically using the census day files.
Debbie Goode: The IR person needs to be involved from the very beginning to ensure all
necessary data is captured for necessary stats. Cindy suggested if Tom Sutherlin is retiring, CU
should hire his replacement and let them work with the Banner implementation.
Julie Duncan: Registrar’s Office
Term Codes – Using the full year of the academic year, plus 10, 20, or 30 to indicate the term:
200810 – Fall 2007
200820 – Spring 2008
200830 – Summer 2008
I can’t remember exactly, but I’m thinking they also had some that were like 200815 which would
be for things like transfer work that came in under a full academic year or maybe that was for an
intercession between Fall and Spring. Linda might remember more on that.
UCO referenced it and I just saw it in a message from the ODS listserv. It sounds like Banner has
different terms:
Enrolled = eligible to register
Registered = actually in classes
Not sure how you get to the eligible to register point but perhaps it's similar to our current process
of active vs inactive. So basically enrolled will mean has been active within the last year.
Registered students are the ones active this semester.
Deficiencies - UCO has already paid for a screen to track deficiencies. The screen had ACT and
CPT scores as well as one spot for SAT. It had an area on the bottom left for deficiencies based
on testing and a place in the bottom right for tracking curricular deficiencies. This screen also is
where they limit the student to a certain number of hours regarding enrollment. This is not part of
baseline Banner and they are paying maintenance on this. Paul said to make sure that Banner
doesn’t charge us for this because it’s already been written! I didn’t quite understand all of this,
but I believe their deficiencies work with programs they’ve written behind the scenes to update
the deficiency info but it’s also done with a type of stamp of approval. For example, if they’ve met
all of the prereqs, then they can manually put this stamp on before the transfer work is entered
and then they are allowed to enroll in the class. I may be confusing some of this with how they do
prereqs as that is the same concept. We’ll probably need to get more information on this.
Debbie Goode: Every time this piece of coding requires an update, UCO must pay extra
maintenance to have the update installed, so this will be true for CU as well.
Kelly Simon: UCO paid Banner to develop the SZADEFS screen (see screen shot below). UCO
said we should have this screen included in our software without purchasing it. They use this
screen for the Rose State 0-level courses which are taught by Rose State on the UCO campus.
UCO runs processes to update the Performance Deficiency fields and the overall max limit field.
The ACT and CPT exams also affect the Performance Deficiencies, as do college level courses
and manual updating. The Registration screen interacts with the Overall Max limit field to stop
students from enrolling when they have reached the max. The screen below can be overridden
to allow the student to enroll. I’ve attached the functional specs document UCO built with
SungardHE when installing Banner.
Julie Duncan: Retention GPA – they’ve tricked Banner into doing this and we will definitely
need more info. It sounded like they modified the HTML code for the online transcript to
recalculate the GPA for this. Banner’s overall GPA includes repeated classes. Banner stores four
GPA’s and UCO needed five.
Articulation
Kelli Peterson: I sent most of the day with Julie Byer, (Senior Articulation Analyst Enrollment
Services) talking about the Articulation portion of Banner. We spent some time looking at the
actual articulation portion of Banner and talking about how their office is performing the actual
task of articulation. Julie provided a copy of the Fundamentals of Articulation Processes
Procedure Manuel.
The manual she provided has actual step by step on how to:
 SOABGTA – Set up Institution in SOABGTA
 SOISBGI – Searching for Institution ACT Number
 SHATATR – Entering An Articulation in SHATATR
 SHATATR – How to Look Up AN Articulation
 ARTICULATION FORMS
- Undergraduate Articulation/Exception Form
- Form Letter to Dept. Chairs
- International Evaluation Form
Julie Duncan: Grading and GPA’s – The GPA is built using a program similar to SBI’s SAR12.
Students aren’t able to see grades until they have been rolled to academic history, but after they
are rolled then changes to the grades can’t be made. During the final grading period, UCO rolls
their grades frequently to allow the students to see their grades during this time. Students are
typically the ones that catch incorrect grades. They then have a behind the scene sql processor
IT wrote that erases the info so the instructor can then re-enter the correct grade while grading is
still going on. Once grading is closed, all grades are rolled a final time and the GPA calc
processor is run. Any grade changes after that have to go through the paper chain approval
process. The GPA calc processor can be run based on criteria which may include a single
student.
Kelly Simon: IT is not involved in Grade Processing. It is all done through the Registrar’s Office
with 5 processors. They were happy to have that ownership.
Julie Duncan: Transcripts – The baseline Banner transcript is not chronological. It prints all of
the transfer work first and then all of the university work – all in order as it is entered into the
system. UCO’s online transcript has been rewritten to be chronological (Jan Douglas). They have
a request to have their printed transcript to be done this way as well but it hasn’t been completed.
Paul expected this to probably be something along the lines of writing the data to temporary
tables, sorting it, and then outputting it using E-Visions.
Debbie Goode: CAPP performs the pre-req checking, so we will have to bring CAPP up even if
we go with DegreeWorks. This is confirmed with SGHE as well. CAPP does not have the selfservice module like DGW offers. They suggest we implement pre-req checking for science and
math and try it for one year and then select other areas for pre-req checking. Felt the phased-in
approach is easier to support.
Kelly Simon: The students are not using CAPP because UCO does not feel comfortable with the
software. When they receive software updates, it causes defects in the system. UCO suggests
we implement course prerequisite checking early in the migration process.
Linda Phillips: This was the first time instructors entered their grades so it was a new process for
them. We’re ahead of the game on this one since we already have that option.
At the end of the semester, grade processing is done in the Registrar’s Office and takes about 30
minutes. There are 5 people involved in the process.
1. Grades are rolled and made available on the web. Grades are rolled two times a day
during the grading period so students can see their grades and contact instructors if
there are errors. Grades can be corrected by instructors during this period.
2. The GPA roll process runs
3. Probation/Suspension/Dean’s-President’s honor roll process runs (takes about 15
minutes)
4. Misc. processes. (They didn’t mention what).
Transcripts are not in chronological order. (This is a problem.). Classes are listed as they are
entered.
Students can print their own official transcripts from a computer located in the lobby area of
registration. Julie and Greg already have a plan for this.
Julie Duncan: Graduate Honors – They changed their graduate honors to GPA based only
fairly recently but they couldn’t remember if they used Banner as an excuse to make this change
or if it happened earlier. They run a process to get the students outputted to an Excel file and sort
them by GPA then post the honors manually.
Non-Banner Graduation Items just of general interest - They have a grand marshall for each
college which is the person in that college with the highest gpa. Highest cumulative hours and
then most UCO hours are used as tie breakers to bring it down to only one person per college.
That person gets to lead the college in the commencement ceremony and it is recorded on their
diploma. They have two commencements: one in May for spring and summer grads and one in
December. They charge $35 for a graduation fee and then a $25 late fee. They have a filing date
of November for spring graduation, February for summer graduation, and June for Fall
graduation. They wait until after the enrollment schedules have been released so that students
will be able to see what they can enroll in to make sure they will be able to graduate before filing.
After these dates, a late fee is assessed but students can continue to file until the regents date
cutoff. Having the date so early gives them more time to do all of the degree checks and contact
the students if there is going to be a problem.
CRN = class sections. The term “section” in Banner means something else.
Displaying Enrollment Schedules – The baseline banner schedule display doesn’t include
comment info like pre-reqs for the class, additional fees, or course catalog information. Most
schools are then having a separate place on their webpages where they post a flat file once or
twice a day that has all of the information in one place. They still print a few schedules but it is
done with pdf files by their print shop. A student who wants a printed schedule goes to the print
shop and pays $7 for a complete schedule or a smaller amount if they only want the pages in
front of the schedule with the general information. Not too many students do this. I believe he said
they’re printing less than 200 copies now.
Creating the enrollment schedule – When UCO went to Banner they changed to having the
departments enter all of the classes instead of the Registrar’s office. This seems to have worked
well for them. For the first year in Banner the departments had to enter all of their classes. After a
year’s worth of data had been entered they began to roll their schedules each time. They roll
corresponding semesters (e.g. Fall 2007 to Fall 2008, Spring 2007 to Spring 2008) so that if a
department has basically the same classes each fall, then they already have 80% of their classes
already entered. At the beginning, they rolled everything using Banner’s roll process. Now they
allow departments to select what elements they do not want included in the roll (e.g. instructor,
building and class, etc.). Paul/IT worked together to write an sql procedure that goes out and
deletes the information they didn’t want rolled after running the Banner process. This custom
process also updates prereqs and catalog information from the current catalog rather than the
rolled catalog as the info from the Fall 2007 catalog may have changed since then. When
departments are entering the classes, the system does facility and time checking. If there is a
conflict then Banner indicates the CRN that has the conflict. They do not use Schedule 25 or any
other software except Banner. Having the departments enter the information has cut down on the
time it takes for them to get the enrollment schedule ready. For the Fall 2009 schedule, Paul
rolled the data in January and the departments were finished in February. Students are able to
see the schedule at least a month before enrollment actually opens.
Clearinghouse – This works fairly well with Banner except they added an sql program to put an
attribute on students that shouldn’t be included (e.g. aren’t really enrolled but just have an
enrollment record built so Banner counts them as enrolled or they are missing the SSN). They
can then run the Banner clearinghouse report using this attribute as part of the parameters to
exclude.
Probation/Suspension/Honor Rolls – They use Banner’s process to post the information to the
student’s record. However, they’ve built object access views to export the list of student’s to then
run reports and letters.
Registration – Permission required/overrides are available via the web. If the person doing the
override goes through the Banner form to do it, then the username is recorded. If they use the
Web override form, it just records WWWUSER. Permission can be given for a particular CRN or
for a course so that they can choose any CRN available for that course. All enrollment
transactions are recorded including errors received. There is a 2000 limit per student which they
have reached at times.
Online Registration –
 Their advisors can do enrollment but prefer not to and typically do not. All registration is
done by the students or by the registrar’s office.
 They have terminals and printers set up in a lobby area where students can come to
register if they wish. Often someone from the registrar’s office will walk around in this
area and help if there are questions. (Note, this area also had a terminal that students
could come and enter their id and password and get an official transcript printed without
having to go to the registrar’s office. The printer attached to that computer is loaded with
official transcript paper. This gets rid of a lot of their traffic.)
 If students have questions, they will call the IT helpdesk which resolves their issues most
of the time but sometimes passes them on to the registrar’s office.
 First-semester students are put on a hold that prevents them from registering until they
have seen an advisor. Once they have been advised, the faculty member has access to
the holds screen and removes them from the hold thus allowing the student to register.
(They don’t actually delete the hold but rather enter a date range that makes it inactive.
This keeps the history of the holds in place.) The student is encouraged to ask questions
of the advisor for the rest of their academic career but they are not forced to. The student
is basically on his own after this point and can register for whatever classes. They haven’t
had an issue with this.
 They have prerequisite checking with a system that allows overrides by calling the
department/school/instructor. We don’t have this and this would be a critical issue with
online enrollment by the students.
Debbie Goode:
 They migrated 7 years of student data. The older transcripts are stored in another
database in .pdf format.
Kelly Simon:
 90% of their students enroll online. They have it set it up by number of hours so that 250
– 300 students can enroll during a set block of time over 12 days.
Linda Phillips:
 They did a mock registration about a month before they went live with student selfenrollment. The first semester of self-enrollment, about 50% of the students used that
service and now 90% enroll themselves.
 They did not implement course pre-reqs at first. They phased them in one department at
a time. Business and math departments were first. (It’s all or nothing on the pre-reqs).
Sometimes the pre-reqs had to be changed to work with the system. ??? (Don’t recall
 the specifics on this.)
 When enrollment opens for a given semester, they have 4 time slots assigned for each
classification, 5 a.m., 10 a.m., 3 p.m., 8 p.m. Students with 130-140 hours enroll first
beginning at 5 a.m.; 129-115 hours begin at 10 a.m., etc.
Chase Bailey: Their online course software was WebCT and it was integrated into Luminus.
They said there are connectors provided by Sungard for WebCT and Blackboard. Sungard
performed this configuration for them.
Student Housing
Casey Case: The student housing personnel at UCO had the following to say about their
transition and the use of Banner –
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Testing is vital. Staff must be committed to testing and given an amount of testing that
should be done daily. UCO actually tracked the amount of time that staff was in the
system doing testing.
Going to the Summit conference can be helpful. Although there is very little at Summit
specifically for housing, learning the student module and making good contacts can make
the transition much easier.
There are several Banner listservs that can be helpful in answering questions.
When billing, Banner uses several types of dates. The “Effective Date” is the most
important because it determines what amount due shows up on the student’s account.
It would be a good idea to go ahead and get a Banner manual to begin to get familiar with
the system.
Before doing anything live with Banner, all of the pricing tables should be written for every
charge in housing. Otherwise, it can cause problems later on. Also, the pricing tables
must be re-written every year.
UCO’s housing department did not have anywhere near the functionality that they
needed in a system from Banner, so they have added a third-party system known as
StarRez that will help manage all of their housing operations. I plan to go back in the near
future to take a look at that system as well.
HR
Debbie Goode: Buy People Admin – it is inexpensive and worth every cent
Financials
Rick Clyburn: Vendor data was manually entered
Debbie Goode: Student A/R rolled for the past 7 years and the older data is stored in Excel.
They use Touch Net for tuition and fee payments. It handles credit cards and checks online. The
credit cards go through Touch Net and there is a percentage the students must pay for this
service – was it 2.5%??? The checks online go through UCO and there is no charge for the
checks online, and this is popular with the students. They can send electronic bills through Touch
Net.
They have the coding done to send info for the claims records to the OSF and shared with TCC
and will be happy to share with CU. They extract the data into Access and FTP to OSF.
Cheryl Davis: Do you use a credit card for purchases instead of a Purchase Order? If so do you
receive a file from the credit card company indicating the charges for the month and how do you
process this file for payment? They do receive a file from the credit card company and I believe
they said they have a an interface for processing this.
Financial Aid
Angela Melton: Carol Claiborne and I met with Sheila Fugett McGill, Director Financial Aid
IT person in the FA Office – Becky – responsible for the ISIR process, POP selects (queries),
Pell, SMART,ACG file transfers to DOE, etc.
Data Migration- UCO migrated 3 years of data (federal requirement to have at least 3 years). CU
has a 5 year minimum for the 2002 migrated. Financial Aid may need to verify this. UCO
Financial Aid went live in March 2002 with the new aid year (2003). The old system stayed up to
complete the prior year (2001) ending in October 2002. Sheila said it was difficult processing aid
for two years in two different systems, but they survived. Sheila mentioned that I would need to
get with Jan Douglass for details of the data migration. Jan said no matter what they tell you
Financial Aid data must be migrated. You will have to be persistent. I plan to contact Jan to get
details of how the data migration was accomplished.
SAP Processor – UCO has the Banner SAP processor working. Jan and Sheila spend
substantial time and effort over a 2 year period to set it up and get it tuned. It is now working with
only a few exceptions. UCO had to make some SAP policy changes.
OTAG- initial awarding can be done with packaging rules during setup. Jan would like info on CU
OTAG Award Claim program.
Tracking - UCO does this in batch, CU currently does automatic tracking. Banner will probably
do automatic tracking.
FA office has no manual student data files, imaging is used for everything. UCO has a full-time
person responsible for imaging (not just FA) and has 5 student workers. This person reports to
the student services, but is currently housed in FA.
Letters – Award, Tracking, etc. All FA letters are emailed. Using MS Total Access Emailer. A
few student specific letters are mailed.
Scholarships & Awards – Federal awards are setup as Funds. Scholarships, waivers and other
awards are setup as Resources. Analyze this before deciding on setup. If an award is setup as a
Resource the enrollment checking and other features will not work. Fund area anything paid in
increments will not work (month payments).
UCO disburses funds to the student after the semester starts.
UCO has book charges.
Enrollment Online – Summer & Fall cannot be turned off by term (it’s by year)???
UCO has system managers from each area that meet to communicate and manage how
processes impact other areas.
Carol Claiborne:
 We already complete the entire process of bringing ISIRs in from the processor. A
portion of the process at UCO is done by IT. We will still be able to complete the process
in our office with Banner. We spent quite a bit of time on this subject.
 UCO uses optical imaging for all their files. No paper. I hope we can eventually do that.
 UCO has automated Satisfactory Academic Progress which will be wonderful if we can
get it to work.
 The Return of Title IV funds is also automated at UCO. Currently we manually calculate
all Return of Title IV funds.
 All the letters from the Financial Aid Office at UCO are run through Banner. Each letter is
tracked in Banner. When talking to students the staff knows when each letter was sent.
This would be very helpful.
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The majority of correspondence with students is done through e-mail. This year new
students to UCO will receive a letter in the mail explaining e-mail correspondence. The
savings in postage, paper, envelopes and staff time is significant.
UCO’s OCR and Tuition Waiver reports are done through the Institutional Research
Office not Financial Aid.
Student workstudy wages are automatically updated from Payroll to aid awards. We
currently manually post wages earned once a year.
With permission from the other areas, the Aid office has the ability to view information
from other offices (Registrar, Admissions, Business Office). This could be very
beneficial.
Training
Cheryl Davis: You indicate on your webpage that you require a training session on navigating
Banner before a person receives their login information and another required training for
Timekeepers.
How are these training sessions conducted? They have a trainer that does basic training for
Banner navigation (approx 30 minutes). During migration they had 3 full time trainers, now there
is just one person. I wasn’t clear on how much training that person does within the departments
or if each department has someone else also.
Chase Bailey: It is a basic overview training giving the user enough information to run the
software and login. They leave the fine grain detail of the training up to the users in the
Department. They said it was important for the user in the department to keep documentation of
their job duties.
Cheryl Davis: Is it just one on one as logins are requested? Every two weeks in depts.?
Does IT do most of the trainings? Departments do their own training.
User Setup
How do you deal with user management and setup of logins? Banner comes with some standard
roles, but those have to be customized and added to. Their normal setup is not a standardized
approach. The approvals are handled by the department or owner of the data. There was some
‘pointing’ to their heads and saying the process was not on paper. I never did get a clear answer
on how they track a user’s access.
Chase Bailey: They did not have an automated electronic workflow process for setup of logins.
They are still requesting login access with a paper form. They did say they delegated the
Payroll/Finance department privileges to setup permissions for their own users within Banner.
Cheryl Davis: Is there a workflow process that includes the required trainings? Not standard
ODS
Debbie Goode: The IR should be the lead on development. Their IR came in just as they were
implemented. Many data elements are not available because no one knew what IR might need
for reporting purposes and has to respond w/ data ‘not available’ on some items on surveys.
They run nightly stores to ODS and use it for daily reporting. ODS is not a mirror of Banner. 80%
of Banner is in ODS. CU must be sure to ask for technical ODS training.
Cheryl Davis: Discuss data-warehousing (EDW) and operational data-store. They are in the
beginning stages of setting this up. They intend to use these two entities for the majority of
reporting purposes.
Chase Bailey: They are currently in the process of implementing the ODS. They did not
purchase the EDW. ODS and EDW will reside on a server together and will be 2 instances of
oracle. The ODS will contain about 80% of the data in the Banner database. They said Sungard
performed all of the mapping of the data from Banner to the ODS and said that if we need more
data added to this mapping to get with Sungard during this process. The data will be structured
in the ODS in such a way that it eases the reporting process for the end user. They are planning
on refreshing the data from Banner to the ODS 1 time a day but this may increase. I assume the
refresh process could be performed often since the process would only need to copy changes
since the last refresh in the Banner Database tables and would not be a full import.
Building/Room Inventory
Debbie Goode: They are using FAMIS now and they do not recommend this software.
Change Management
Debbie Goode: Establish a business process team to evaluate all processes and identify the
processes that need to be changed. Start that now.
Make the university e-mail address an official record of notification
UCO is almost paperless
Cheryl Davis: Do you generate a campus employee directory from Banner? They don’t but said
there is an option to do it.
Is your online course software integrated into Banner? Yes – they are WebCT and it works nicely
Banner seems to have updates available on a weekly basis. Can you discuss your procedures for
updates including scheduling and frequency? They have scheduled down-time, one Sunday
morning a month for any updates that are planned. They do FINAID updates when they come
out. Also, tax updates are done as they are made available.
Do you have any employees who successfully use a screen reader (e.g. JAWS or Window Eyes)
with the Banner products? No
What do you use for job scheduling? They use Kron for anything they schedule, but the users do
most of their own job scheduling. We purchased Appworx.
When you have problems with the software, is Banner quick to fix these issues? They are quick
to “assist” with problem/errors, but not so quick to handle software fixes.
Please share about the process for setting up users to use Banner software. There is no set
process. They must not have the turnover that we do.
NO-NOs:
Be careful about implementation dates for each module
Don’t be without a good reporting tool
Don’t put an ‘*’ in the first character of the Banner ID
Be careful about setting up vendor ids/lender ids