PeopleSoft conversion goes smoothly for
OIT
by Sarah
R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff
fter months of groaning about PeopleSoft and
the difficulties of converting to a new system, campus employees
have something to cheer about. In a marathon session that ran from
6 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 28, to 4 a.m. Monday, Sept. 30, 50 staffers
converted 36,697 student records from the old system to SPIRE, the
student information system segment of PeopleSoft, with nearly flawless
performance.
"We had phenomenal
accuracy," said Rosio Alvarez, associate chancellor for Information
Technologies and Planning. Overall, counting errors such as missing
punctuation, 93 percent of the completed student records were wholly
accurate.
"This is
unheard of for an event of that size," she said. "We'll
make PeopleSoft history."
Staff converted
current students' course and demographic records from the Legacy
system, located in Information Technology Services at the President's
Office, to SPIRE, where students, faculty and about 250-300 staff
members will be able to access course registration information.
"We brought
over 1.6 million enrollments," Alvarez said, referring to the
individual courses listed on student records. "That's 40-some
courses per student. Of those, there were only 1,096 errors. That's
about .07 percent."
The staff entering
the data included 20 people from OIT and an additional 30 from offices
around campus that work with student records, including Housing,
Admissions, Registrar, Bursar's, the Graduate School and Continuing
Education. Alvarez said staff rotated in and out of the conversion
all weekend.
"Literally,
we had beds in the break room," she said. "People took
turns sleeping - it was tag-team conversion. There was a lot of
pizza, a lot of sugar."
The reason for the marathon session was to limit the days the records
were inaccessible to one, Alvarez said.
"We had to
have the system ready and operational by Monday morning, so we could
test the system that day, but we didn't want to extend it beyond
that," she said.
The converted records were those of current students and those who
might re-enroll in the near future.
"We still
have [the records of] about 200,000 inactive students sitting on
the Legacy system," she said. "We'll have to partition
those out and bring them over in pieces over the course of the next
six to eight months."
Login information
and passwords for 25,000 students were mailed Oct. 9, Alvarez said.
Registration for the spring semester begins Nov. 13, she said.
"We don't call it 'pre-registration' because once they sign
up, they are guaranteed the course," she said.
Based on their
"priority rating," students will be assigned half-hour
windows of time when they can first register. These slots are not
their only opportunity to sign up for classes, but also they are
their first available position in the queue to get in coveted classes.
Faculty will be
able to see their course rosters as they are developing, Alvarez
said. "It's in real time."
Overrides and
add/drops will be handled by department staff, she said, and will
continue to be at the discretion of the faculty.
As of the second
week of October, faculty were scheduled to be able to view class
rosters for the current semester on-line, she said.
OIT is currently
"stress testing" the system to prepare it for student
use, she said. Alvarez said she hopes students will spend some time
on SPIRE, learning how to move around in it before they register.
Currently only the fall schedule is available online, but spring
courses should be visible by the end of October, she said.
"There will
be no newsprint course schedules, she said.
"We've been
getting calls from faculty and staff into the Help Desk, which is
now supporting this. They've been very positive, so it sounds like
people are liking it."
SPIRE can be viewed online (http://spire.umass.edu/saha/index.asp).
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