SIS Project sets launch of PeopleSoft Student Records

By Heidi Dollard, special to the Chronicle

he Student Information Systems (SIS) Project is on track to go live with PeopleSoft Student Records on Oct. 2, followed by Student Financials in November and Financial Aid in February. SIS will bring a number of exciting new features and changes to the campus.

     SPIRE is the new self-service Web site for students, instructors, advisors and academic department staff. It will replace WISE, the current Web site, and offer many of the same functions and some new ones. The most exciting change is that students and staff will use SPIRE for registration, starting with spring pre-registration in November.
The registration screens are integrated with a class search ability, making add/drop more efficient. Some new features for students include the ability to view and print their unofficial transcripts and viewing any outstanding holds (now called "service indicators") with detailed information on how to resolve them. SPIRE allows instructors to view up-to-the-minute class rosters and enter grades directly online. All users, including prospective students, can search the online course catalog.

     The SIS Project has been conducting training sessions on SPIRE and other aspects of the new system all summer. Those users that had access to the legacy student system were automatically given similar access to SIS and advisors and academic department staff were invited to attend training. If you fall into one of those categories, and did not receive an invitation, contact Sandy Hay at 7-0884 or by e-mail (skhay@oit.umass.edu). We are not conducting training sessions for instructors or students. They will receive instructions and an information packet with their logon ID and password in late September and early October.

     The most difficult and time consuming part of the SIS Project was converting the legacy data into PeopleSoft. The volume and complexity of the data was enormous. All students that had a record on the legacy system must have all their demographic and academic history moved to SIS, completely and accurately. Since many students have taken courses over many years, even decades, we converted some course data going back to 1936. Over the first conversion weekend, starting Sept. 28, SIS will be converting about 30,000 student records. We expect to have the data to be available around Oct. 1.

     Over the next year, we will be converting a total of 225,000 unique student records and over 4.5 million enrollment records. The catalog and schedule conversion is complete, and includes over 176,000 course records and over 256,000 course sections. Because so many changes occurred over the years to academic rules and policies, names of majors and courses, and conventions for recording data, the conversion was a massive effort for both the OIT and Registrar's Offices.

     Many people on campus are confused about the relationship between SIS and the HR and Financials projects that have recently gone live. The SIS, Human Resources and new Financials System all use PeopleSoft software. However, the HR and PeopleSoft Financials systems are a President's Office project (e*mpac) based in Worcester. SIS is a separate, Amherst campus-based initiative and is part of the Office of Information Technologies.

     SIS will be the source for directory information about students, employees, and campus guests. The SIS also will send data files to the Library, OIT account management and the UCard offices, among others, for use in their department systems.
To find out more about the new system, an all-campus informational meeting will be held Tuesday, Sept. 24 at 1:30 p.m. in 162-175 Lincoln Campus Center. More information is available online (http://sisproject.acso.umass.edu/) and (http://spire.umass.edu).

     Heidi Dollard is the Student Information System Project manager.