January 24, 2006

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the new Banner News listserv. We have subscribed all faculty and staff to this listserv initially, but you may unsubscribe if you do not wish to receive periodic updates on the status of this project over the next couple of years. (Instructions are at the bottom of this e-mail.) At this point we are planning a bi-weekly update to communicate progress, changes, announcements, etc. We will also be launching a Web site very soon with these updates, and will include a fairly detailed timeline, steering committee list, teams and their members, and more.

What is Banner?
For those of you who may not have heard of Banner before, it is a comprehensive, integrated system that encompasses student records, financial aid, admissions, alumni, advancement, and accounting operations. Banner has been available for two decades, and during that time has been undergoing constant development. It is currently the most widely used package in higher education administration.

Banner is comprehensive - it covers all of the areas that our current systems address plus adds some new capabilities. It is integrated - all the parts work together and run using the same database (e.g. a person in Banner has a single set of demographic records whether they are a student, faculty, or alum, or all three at once). It provides hundreds of Web-based transaction screens which will replace good old STUREG, CRSPRF, INTERN, etc. and self-service functions for students and faculty not unlike my.newpaltz.edu.

Why Change?
Since computing began at New Paltz, feeding stacks of punched cards into a computer roughly the size of twenty refrigerators, we have relied on the local programming staff to write the systems, which support the administrative functions of the College. The scope of what we do has grown dramatically, and although the tools we use have improved and we have been very successful in leveraging what we have already accomplished (my.newpaltz.edu is first rate), new systems are taking an increasingly long time to implement. We could not hope to ever catch up on the backlog of what the campus wants and needs continuing along as we were. We have tried adding on commercial packages for complicated systems, like credit card processing and foreign student reporting, but even tying these into our current system had proven to be very time consuming. We needed a 'great leap forward.' We had partially re-engineered what we had developed in the multi-year effort for Y2K. We either had to re-engineer the rest or move to a comprehensive package.

Things are changing more quickly than ever, and new possibilities, expanded communications, and mandated changes in reporting requirements happen on a regular basis. It has become clear that we with our locally developed system are hard pressed to keep up. We don't have the depth of staff that is required. And, as keeping pace has gotten harder, introducing new capabilities has become very difficult.

Why Banner?
The Banner package, from Sungard SCT, is a good, flexible, comprehensive system. It is able to generally meet the administrative system requirements for the campus and is actively being improved and expanded with each new release.

In addition, over the past fifteen years, it has become the de facto stand system for SUNY colleges with almost thirty campuses running the software. To support these campuses, SUNY has deployed the SICAS Center at Oneonta to 'SUNYize' Banner. As a result, when you adopt this platform you not only get the development effort of the programming teams at SCT, but you also have the staff at the SICAS center developing the special add-ons to meet New York State's TAP, Higher Ed, or SUNY reporting requirements.

Why Now?
We looked at Banner twice before and at those times the product did not offer an attractive enough set of features and functions to justify the time, effort and expense of migrating to the package. In fact, in many ways, our current system was better. This has changed. Banner has matured. It now is a complete system, and has a suite of add-on features including document imaging, portal integration, and reporting. In addition, all of the separate add-on systems that we have adopted have built-in integration into Banner Student - including Blackboard. So, our expectation is that at this point the significant effort expended in moving to Banner will in fact result in a gain in some significant capabilities.

There are very significant financial incentives for moving now. To encourage campuses to adopt Banner, SUNY is absorbing the software license fees. In addition, the SICAS center has pre-purchased a huge block of consulting time from SCT at a significant discount and is re-selling these services to the campuses. Hence the implementation support and training, which we receive, will be at a greatly reduced rate. New Paltz is one of eight SUNY campuses that have jumped on this opportunity to move to Banner at a significant savings.

The final reason is that there are very significant changes to SUNY reporting in the works. If we move now, we can avoid many months of re-programming our current system, as the SICAS center will be responsible for implementing these new mandates for all of the SUNY Banner campuses.

How Big An Effort Is It?
It will take us almost two years to switch over to Banner. During that time we will be loading our data into the system, learning how it works, learning how to make it do what we want, and linking Banner into our other campus systems. We will have everything running on Banner by the Fall 2007 semester. This means that we will be using Banner to process Fall 2007 applicants by the end of 2006, and then flow from there through Financial Aid processing, Fall 2007 pre-registration, billing, and then final registration. During this period, the offices involved will be doing 'double duty' - learning and configuring the new system while still using the current one, and then, in some cases, entering data on both the old and the new system for a period of time. We will be arranging for some extra help, but of course, extra efforts will be required of the current staff (because they are the ones who know how things work).

Between now and then there will be many hundreds of hours of training and testing. It will be a lot of work and a fair amount of 'agita'. Overall, in the end, we will have a more capable system then we if we continued along our current path.

What Stays / What Goes:
Several of our current systems including Blackboard, AdAstra room scheduling, fsaAtlas SEVIS reporting and TouchNet online payment processing all stay. In these cases, we have to tie these systems into Banner. Most of these have interfaces already built for that purpose. A significant part of my.newpaltz.edu will be replaced by Banner for Students / Banner for Faculty. However, there are parts of my.newpaltz.edu that are unique or significantly more capable than their Banner equivalents, and these we will be carrying over (although we have yet to figure out exactly how to do this).

Our regular npmail e-mail system stays, and will be integrated into the new portal . The portal has a calendaring system which supports layers of information and the sharing of calenders. (Those people who use GroupWise solely for this purpose will no longer need to do so.)

The next installments will cover "What is Banner like?" and "How will things change?" Stay tuned!