NeSIS eNews - March 2025

It's Internal Audit Season!

To ensure ongoing compliance and mitigate security risks, the STAMP team initiated annual security audits in 2014. These audits are designed to review and validate user access privileges, ensuring alignment with current roles and responsibilities. This proactive approach is critical in preventing unauthorized access and addressing potential findings from regulatory audits, such as those conducted by the State Auditors. To help things go smoothly, if you get a request for additional information, please respond as soon as you can.

The scope of our audits includes not only access to Campus Solutions, but also the authorization levels for third-party applications. These audits are performed utilizing three specific tools, with oversight and engagement provided by the STAMP team and the direct involvement of Campus Security Coordinators.

  • Grouper Attestation: Used to track access to FTP, WebFOCUS, FTP, VDI, TWS and State College VPN

  • WebFOCUS Dashboard: Used to deliver audit reports for review

Audit Reports available in WebFOCUS
  • SharePoint:  Used to store tracking sheets for report data manipulation and progress tracking.

 

List of annual audits:

  • Campus Solutions audits - external and internal

    • APA State Auditors - Begin in May, on-site for the firs two weeks of June, retain access through July or December

    • Student Financials and Financial Aid

      • Forvis (NU) - Access from May/June to December

      • Forvis (SC) - Access from May/June to December

    • NU - Internal Audits, 24/7 access

    • SC - NOG/ACE CCPE - Access for a few months in the Fall

    • STAMP and Campus Security Coordinators Annual External User Audits - February - April, and ad-hoc as needed

  • Sunapsis User audits - December/January

  • EMS User audits - December/January

 

Quarterly audits:

  • Database accounts

 

Our audit process has been subject to continuous optimization. Starting with manual procedures and progressing through the implementation of complex queries, we have achieved significant gains in efficiency through the adoption of Grouper for streamlined user reviews and WebFOCUS for rapid reporting. We are committed to further simplifying and optimizing the audit process to ensure maximum effectiveness.

Helen Fankhauser
PeopleSoft Security Analyst

PeopleTools 8.61 Upgrade Beginning

The NeSIS Team has begun the process of applying PeopleTools version 8.61 to Campus Solutions and analyzing changes and impacts. This is all in preparation for campus testing to ensure everything will be working correctly once the upgrade is applied to the Production instances. To help consolidate information about the PeopleTools upgrade, a page is available in SharePoint that will be updated with additional information as we move through the next few months. As you know, testing of all processes by our campus teammates is crucial and we would like to thank you in advance for your testing efforts in the coming months. We truly couldn't do it without you! 

What does a HEUG Ambassador Do?

The responsibilities to being an Ambassador are somewhat fluid. Since this is the first year the program returned after a break, the responsibilities we are doing this year may not be what it will eventually contain.

 

We meet once a quarter via zoom to discuss how we can help the HEUG organization. This involves emailing HEUG members, posting on social media about upcoming events and posting to HEUG listservs. The first quarter our assignment is to promote the Alliance Conference. This is the main conference for the organization and they would like to get as many participants as possible. Our job is to support the HEUG organization with this goal.

Shareen Thewke
Functional Coordinator, Financial Aid

Stellic Project Update

A huge amount of work has been completed in the past year on the project to implement the Stellic degree audit system for UNK, UNL and UNO.

The main outcome of the project is to consolidate and replace the previous degree audit systems at the three campuses to a centralized cloud product and maintain a single interface to SIS data for Degree auditing. This will give Academic staff better tools to meet enrollment goals and directly support NU President Gold's “Odyssey to Extraordinary” foundational pillar of “Extraordinary Teaching & Learning”.

Stellic is a modern, user friendly and intuitive degree audit tool that provides improvements for students, advisors, deans and directors. Students will gain better tools to plan their degree path and be able to register for the right classes at the right time based on a multi-year plan. Advisors will have a better interface for degree programs and the ability to generate reports that have customized filters and sorting for their student populations. Deans and directors can plan classes and instructors based on courses that are in the students' multi-year plan.

To handle the development load that this project requires, development teams from the three campuses and ITS/NeSIS are working together to build one set of interfaces that will work for all campuses. Members of the Stellic development team are Dan Kenny, Eric Wingert and Andrew Jacobsen from UNO, Jon Anderson, Scott Davis and Terry Pramberg from UNL and Mitch O'Neill from UNK and Meghna Jain, Jean Padrnos, Paul Swenson and Jay Killion from ITS/NeSIS. This model has proved to work very well.

Development is occuring in four phases:

  • Phase I - Degree Audit/Student Planner - Initial development - 5 months, 9 developers

    • Additions, Enhancements and Fixes done in two-week sprints

    • File-based batch extracts

    • Forty-nine (49) Student Information System interfaces - and counting!

    • Additional integrations - Federated authentication, ID card photos, legacy degree audit systems

    • In Production for UNK and UNO

  • Phase II - Registration - Initial development - 4 months, 3-5 technical resources

    • Bi-directional web APIs for real-time communication

    • Eleven (11) endpoints for initial implementation

    • In testing

  • Phase III - Degree Clearance

    • Four initial file-based batch extracts identified

    • In requirements gathering

  • Phase IV - Transfer Credit

    • Vendor development

  • Reporting/Analytics

    • Planning stages for exporting data from Stellic

 

Currently, UNK went live with Phase I in the Fall of 2024, UNO went live in January 2025 and UNL is planning on going live in 2025 at a date to be determined. Work is currently underway on Phases 2, 3 and 4 and the Reporting module. 

One of the benefits of a shared development process is that things were developed to be able to be utilized by all campuses instead of having three separate sets of code. The Nebraska State College schools have since decided to implement Stellic for their schools and should be able to take advantage of the work that's already been done for the University schools which should decrease the effort to get them up and running.

Thanks for all of the hard work on this project by the campus Registrars and developers.

 

Upcoming Events

Monday, March 10

9am - QANU/SC - Apply FA PRP

 

Tuesday, March 11

9am - SC Financial Aid Team Meeting

10:30am - SR Team Meeting

 

Thursday, March 13

9am - Enterprise Tools/Dashboard Team Meeting

 

Friday, March 14

Deadline for Eforms to be out of TSTNU/SC

Deadline for mods/Eform to be out of DEVNU/SC

 

Monday, March 17

1pm - QASC Refresh 

DEVNU/SC - Apply PT8.61

PRDNU/SC - Apply FA PRP

 

Tuesday, March 18

DEVNU/SC - Apply PT 8.61

9am - Financial Aid Team Meeting

 

Wednesday, March 19

9am - Admissions Team Meeting

Deadline for mods to be out of TSTNU/SC

 

Thursday, March 20-Friday, March 21

TSTNU/SC - Apply PT8.61

 

Monday, March 24 - Tuesday, April 1

TSTNU/SC Open for PT8.61 Testing

 

 

Monday, March 24

3pm - Campus Community Team PT8.61 Testing - TST

4pm - Admissions Team PT8.61 Testing - TST

 

Tuesday, March 25

9am - AD Shared App PT8.61 Testing - TST

 

Wednesday, March 26

9am - Student Records Team Meeting

10:30am - Student Financials Team Meeting

 

Thursday, March 27

1:30pm - Enterprise Tools Team PT8.61 Testing - TST

 

Friday, March 28

Deadline for last PRD migration until 5/5

 

Monday, March 31 - Tuesday, April 1

Last PRD Migration until 5/5

8am - QANU Refresh

QANU/SC - Apply PT8.61

 

Tuesday, April 1

9am - Financial Aid Team Meeting

10am - Financial Aid Team PT8.61 Testing - TST

 

Wednesday, April 2

QANU/SC Open for PT8.61 Testing

 

Wednesday, April 2

10:30am - Student Financials Team Meeting

 

Friday, April 4

9am - AD Shared App PT8.61 Testing - QA

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