Information Technology Status
April 20, 2007
Library System
The second series of training sessions was held March 13-15. We are finished with the long list of
tasks related to mapping the date from the old system to the new one. A prototype online catalog
is ready for intensive testing. The bibliographic database has been extracted and the author and
subject authority work has been finished. We are on schedule to meet our target for go-live by
July 1, 2007.
Common Management Systems/ CMS 8.9 Upgrade
The CMS/PeopleSoft Student Administration and Human Resources systems were successfully
upgrade to version 8.9 during Spring Break. HR/SA systems were not available for campus
transactions or viewing from March 16th to Monday, March 26th. During the downtime the portal
links to self-service activities were disabled. Very few problems were encountered during the
cutover and users are reporting that the new navigation and streamline pages and processes are
an improvement over the previous version.
New functionality for faculty/students includes the CMS modification to the degree audit report
that results from directives from the Facilitating Graduation initiative. Fall registration in the new
system begins Tuesday April 17th. Human Resources worked with the TLP to develop some selfservice 8.9 navigation training using Camtasia that has proven to be well received by users
In April, Human Resources staff begins work on their last ‘core’ CMS modules Benefits
Administration and Absence Management. Both should be complete by the end of the calendar
year.
CMS Production
The CMS/PeopleSoft Financials systems successfully completed the move to the new Revenue
Management system with final cutover to the new bank systems on April 2.
Staff from Human Resources, Financial Services, Student Administration, and Information
Resources attended a CSU-sponsored one day workshop with presentations from other
campuses and Oracle about various CMS/PeopleSoft topics.
Data Warehouse
IBM has provided an Ascential’s patch for our ETL tool that the DBA’s installed last week to
(hopefully) resolve the intermittent table load issues for the financials EPM warehouse. The
warehouse enterprise team will be attending the Higher Ed Data Warehouse conference in May.
The data warehouse program manager is working with several groups to identify additional
content/access to tables for the warehouse including COB (STEPS), Credentials, and
Advancement. They are continuing to test some Business Intelligence tools and the program
manager will participate on the CO team for procurement of a system wide licensed BI tool.
Blackboard Vista
Spring semester with Vista started out with some bumps in the road but for the most part has
been pretty stable the last couple months. We have purchased additional "application servers" to
add to our Vista architecture for purposes of both better managing the system and also managing
the growth of migrating courses from WebCT Campus Edition to Vista.
We have more Chico State students in Vista than we ever had in WebCT Campus Edition, all the
while the number of faculty and course sections actively using the new Vista learning
management system are increasing.
Active Course Sections
Active Instructors
Active Students
Spring 2005 Campus Edition
1325
639
14,195
Spring 2006 –
Campus Edition
1547
760
14,727
Spring 2007 -Vista
1011
557
14,943
For Summer 2007, we will be testing the latest release of Vista 4.2. If all goes well, we will
upgrade our current system mostly for the sake of fixing many of the current bugs found in Vista
4.1. For Fall 2007, we expect online courses to be in Vista. The portal will no longer link to
WebCT Campus Edition.
Security
Security is using a new database – Omni – for the server registry. There are over 500 servers in
the registry with ~ 70 server administrators identified. The Omni database also tracks firewall
rules. All campus system owners and system administrators are encouraged to keep their server
information in OMNI current. McAfee Foundstone, our new vulnerability management tool, is
being implemented April 16 and 17. Server administrator training will be held over the summer so
they can learn to use the tool to initiate scans on their own systems and receive reports.
Enterprise Systems
Anti-Spam – ESYS has configured Proofpoint for roughly 40 test users. The test user experience
has been excellent. Final implementation rests on data migration of users to either Active
Directory or the campus LDAP. ESYS is working diligently with USRV with resolution expected
later this month.
Virtualization – Select ESYS staff members will be attending VMWare training in April.
Server Patching – ESYS has installed Satellite Server from Red Hat for applying operating
system patches.
Backup and Log File Retention – The Chancellors Office has established retention levels on
certain types of data. We have examined the impact to Enterprise Systems. We will need to
purchase a central log file server. We will also need to notify other campus administrators of the
pending data retention levels.
Web Development
Campus Web Server – User/Group migration is completed and a test of the system with a copy of
the current live data is underway. Departmental sites in and outside of IRES will be tested for
compatibility.
Web Accessibility – The draft of the First Year Web Report is being prepared for the Chico ATI
Web Committee. The HI Software monitoring and remediation software (AccMonitor) has been
installed and configurations to monitor the pages on the list are complete. A communication has
been e-mailed to departmental contacts of our representative pages explaining their pages
inclusion in Chico’s list of sites. Phase II will involve providing training on web accessibility to the
broader campus web development community and in identifying web sites in need of remediation.
WEBD continues to participate in bi-weekly conference calls with the rest of the campuses to stay
informed of what is being done at different locations.
Portal – Planning for summer work has begun. A statement of work has been prepared and
contact with Unicon for support has been initiated. Work is to include an upgrade to uPortal 2.6
along with the new layout manager that will allow for more granular targeting of channel content
to users. Research has begun on the feasibility of upgrading CAS if the newest version allows for
load-balancing.
Web Content Management – The Web Content Management System Committee has met
regularly every Monday. The committee has currently reviewed criteria used to purchase the
current product called Collage and seen a Collage demo. They have rated Collage according to
that original criteria and have some concerns about moving forward with this product. The
committee will begin reviewing and evaluating other WCMS products to determine what might be
Chico's next best move in this arena.
ITRP (Infrastructure Terminal Resources Project)
ITRP (equipment part of TII) is well underway with both network cores in Butte and Meriam
installed and in service. Glenn, Trinity and Continuing Education have parallel networks and have
also migrated to the new network. Siskiyou and Taylor have also cut over but they were both ‘hot
cut’ buildings requiring some weekend down time to migrate to the new network. Cutting the
buildings over to the new network has gone very smoothly with only a hand full of issues found in
each. Issues have been resolved within 24 hours and most within hours of notification. A revised
schedule of the ITRP rollout can be found at http://www.csuchico.edu/ires/projects/itrp/index.html.