NeSIS eNews - May 2024

Director's Corner

Bridging the Future

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Oracle Research Executive Summit a couple of weeks ago in San Francisco. It was a great group of R1 schools all using Oracle products and sharing strategies and plans. Here are a couple of takeaways I’m following up on.

I’ve been added to the Oracle Student Advisory Council which is the group that is the “guardian of the 10-year plan” for Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions. A past survey by Oracle to the group identified AI and integration simplification as the top needs. Oracle’s ability to natively embed AI into Campus Solutions is being researched. They believe it will take 6-9 months to determine if it’s architecturally possible and will announce more in that timeframe. On the integration front, Oracle is working with 1EdTech on Edu-API academic enterprise specifications to improve SIS to LMS or other academic systems that consume or process roster and/or grade data.

There were many schools there that have implemented Oracle Cloud for HR and Finance and prepping for the Student offering some time in the future. There were many lessons learned shared about how governance and IT support are different in the cloud. Many spoke of preparing for the change by removing customizations that aren’t critical, business process reevaluation, and learning as much as they can (from other schools and consulting companies) in advance of the implementation. One presenter shared a philosophy of “not paving the cow path” meaning not every functionality in the old system will be necessary in the new system. On the flip side, if there’s a fence in the road, make sure you understand why it’s there before you remove it. I’ll be working to understand ways we can prepare as we continue to consider the drivers for change that make sense for us.

March and April 2024 NeSIS Award Winners

The NeSIS Employee Shining Impactful Superstar award winner for March 2024 was Shareen Thewke and for April 2024 is Paul Swenson.

Shareen is the Financial Aid Functional Coordinator and always does an outstanding job of coordinating the many changes that happen in the FA area every year. This year has been especially challenging because of the FAFSA Simplification project and Shareen has more than risen to the challenge. She has spoken to many different groups about the timelines and challenges the campuses are facing, as well as tracking and coordinating the changes coming from Oracle and working with the campuses to ensure it goes smoothly. Thank you Shareen for your organization and willingness to tackle new challenges!

Paul is the Lead Developer for the NeSIS Team and works tirelessly to coordinate completion of the many Change Requests required to keep everything functioning and moving forward. Recently, the Stellic degree audit project brought along with it many Change Requests that required extensive development in addition to many other projects that also needed to be completed. Paul took the lead role on the Stellic project development of the many extracts, setup pages and modifications that were necessary to complete the project. Thank you Paul, for your hard work and knowledge on the Stellic project and over the years!

Get a Move On!!

There is exciting news regarding Query Writing!!!  You can now move your own queries between instances and not wait for NeSIS to do it for you. This is not new news as you probably heard about it, however, I'll bet you haven’t thought about all the ways in which you can use this new tool.  Below are some examples: 

• If you have ever run an existing query in PRD and - all of a sudden - you get an error. You can now move the Query to QA and work out the issues and then move it back to PRD when you have it fixed. 
• You can develop a query in TST and move it to PRD if QA is getting a refresh. 
• Do you work nights and/or weekends? You can move the query off hours and not wait for NeSIS.

As a reminder, there is documentation provided to remind you how to use it. The process is very simple and very fast. We hope you take advantage of this new feature in your query writing to reduce the number of Query errors being discovered in our logs.

Upcoming Enterprise Tools Project Updates

In the Fall of 2023, the Campus Community team decided to revisit all of the enterprise-wide Eforms and workflows to standardize names and email notifications to students. In April, changes to the NU Change of Campus, Intercampus and Residency projects went live. A big thank you goes out to the testers who took the time to test and validate those changes.

A follow-up project for the Change of Campus form is planned for late this summer to incorporate additional changes requested by the Registrars. This fall work will begin on updates to the Immunization and Reverse Transfer projects for both NU and SC

Enhanced Disaster Recovery

As part of the ITS DR Investment effort, the Enhanced DR project was initiated in August of last year to strengthen the resilience of our NeSIS systems. We are leveraging Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services to establish a dedicated recovery zone that will take over critical workloads within 24 hours of a disaster or security incident. This zone will contain redundant computing, storage, networking, and data synchronization. The OCI resources will be isolated from our Lincoln data center to prevent cascading failures. We are synchronizing a copy of the QA database within the recovery zone for load testing and evaluating resource utilization and application performance. The Enhanced DR project is a significant step forward in safeguarding the critical business of the University, championed and funded as an initiative from the Office of the President.

Suzan Manthey to Retire May 17

After almost 31 years of service to the University of Nebraska, Suzan Manthey, Student Financials and Dashboard Functional Coordinator for NeSIS, will be retiring on May 17. 

On In July 1993, Suzan began her University of Nebraska career at UNL supporting the student information system for the Office of Registration and Records and later, the Office of Financial Aid. In 2011, she joined the NeSIS Team as the Student Financials Functional Coordinator.  Suzan has done an outstanding job of coordinating the Student Financials and Dashboard areas including communication and collaboration with the campuses, and has become one of the NeSIS “Query Queens”. We will miss her knowledge and expertise, but wish her all the best in retirement which will include lots of time at the lake and with her two grandsons. Best of luck, Suzan!!

Monday, May 6

3pm - Campus Community Team Meeting

Tuesday, May 7

9am - Financial Aid Team Meeting

1pm - 920SC Refresh for SF Testing

Wednesday, May 8

10:30am - NU Student Financials Team Meeting

Thursday, May 9

9am - Dashboard Team Meeting

Tuesday, May 14

DEVNU - Apply PT8.60

Mods/Eforms need to be out of DEVNU/SC

Eforms need to be out of TSTNU/SC

9am - SC Financial Aid Team Meeting

10:30am - Student Records Team Meeting

10:30am - SC Student Financials Team Meeting

1:30pm - Integration Team Meeting

Wednesday, May 15

9am - Admissions Team Meeting

Thursday, May 16

DEVSC - Apply PT8.60

Friday, May 17

9am - Enterprise Tools Team Meeting

Tuesday, May 21

9am - Financial Aid Team Meeting

Friday, May 24

Mods need to be out of TSTNU/SC

Monday, May 27

Memorial Day Holiday

Tuesday, May 28 - Wednesday, May 29

TSTNU - Apply PT8.60

Wednesday May 29 - Thursday, May 30

TSTSC - Apply PT8.60

Friday, May 31 - Friday, June 14

TSTNU/SC Open for Testing

Monday, June 10

Last PRD Migration until 7/20

Important Dates for PT8.60 Upgrade

5/31 - 6/14

TST Open for  Testing

6/17 - 7/9

QANU/SC Open for Testing

Tuesday, 7/9 @NOON

Signoff for PT8.60 → PRD

Saturday, 7/13 PM

Campus Functional Office Validation in PRD & Signoff