The Campus Chronicle
Vol. XVIII, Issue 7
for the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts
October 11, 2002

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PeopleSoft conversion goes smoothly for OIT

by Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff

A 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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