You've heard about the Banner 8 upgrade and you know you have been affected by it, but do you really know what went into the planing and implementation of this project that was rolled out on budget and on time?
The short window of time that the system was down was just the tip of the iceberg for the University of Northern Colorado's Information Technology Department to roll out the Banner upgrade. It took months of planning, assembling and testing before the three day conversion that the university members saw on January 30th-February 1st.
The Banner product is used at More than 1,000 colleges and universities throughout the United States. Some colleges and universities have not upgraded to Banner 8 yet, but they are well on their way. The company that wrote Banner (SunGard) required all universities and colleges to upgrade by April 2011.
The Information Technology department began this project in July of 2009. It all started by researching how other universities make the conversion, taking the lessons learned from other institutions and applying them to make our upgrade smoother. After understanding the difficulties that other universities faced with Banner 8 and reading the documentation, IT staff had to build the 30+ servers it actually takes to run Banner. After assembling the server, test plans were written by IT and other departments. then the Banner 8 software was installed on the servers. After months of constructing a test environment, the Information Technology department asked Payroll, Accounts Receivable, HR, Accounting, the Registrar's office, Admissions, and other departments to conduct their tests to verify that Banner 8 was working correctly. Finally, after everything was tested, the Banner 7 information was transferred to Banner 8 and it was ready for faculty, staff and students to use.
All in all, the time, research, and effort put into this project was quite substantial and affected many people from the university. Many of the 70+ staff members in Information Technology worked on this project diligently for more than six months, as did personnel from Payroll, Accounts Receivable, HR, Accounting, the Registrar's office and Admissions.
Next time the UNC's systems are down for maintenance, you can bet that staff members have been putting in a lot of extra time and effort to make sure the maintenance or transition goes smoothl
If you have any questions about the Banner 8 conversion, you can call technical support at 351-HELP.
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