Background about Banner & upcoming changes (for students)
March 30, 2007

We received a great deal of feeback from Dean Ann Minnick's e-mail yesterday and thought some further background and information might be useful.

What is Banner?
Banner is a comprehensive, integrated system that encompasses student records, financial aid, admissions, alumni, advancement, and accounting operations. Banner, a product of SunGard Higher Education, 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 older systems address, and 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 and self-service functions for students and faculty that will be integrated gradually into my.newpaltz.edu.

Why change?
The student record system that is being phased out during this implementation of Banner was "home grown." Our in-house programmers built it from the ground up, and was written in a fairly old, and not as widely used or taught programming language. 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, 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.

Why Banner?
Banner is a 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.

Why now?
This effort actually began a couple of years ago, and we have reached the point in the timeline where this will begin to affect students head-on. It as inevitable - it's a part of the change process. Dozens of faculty and staff are working hard to make this transition as smooth and painless as possible.

It is our expectation that at this point the significant effort expended in moving to Banner will in fact result in a gain in some significant capabilities in the coming months and years.

What do I get out of it?
The conversion to the new my.newpaltz.edu in January was part of the Banner conversion project. In fact, the software that runs my.newpaltz.edu now is the front-end to Banner. It provided a calendar and group studio for students - features that the college was not previously able to provide to students.

Thank you for your feedback!
A couple of weeks ago we implemented Banner's schedule of classes on our Web site (www.newpaltz.edu/classes). We received a great deal of feedback about this site, and our Web programmer quickly went to work to re-write what Banner provided us to respond to the needs of our students. We believe the re-written schedule of classes is now an even better product than our original one before the Banner switch. Stay tuned - we're working on a few more enhancements you'll see in the coming week, that will continue to make it even easier and more useful.

Gradually over the coming weeks and months you will notice a new appearance to some features you've used regularly, both on our public Web site and within my.newpaltz.edu.

Change can be good - and rest assured, there is a team of staffers at the college that have your needs in mind and are doing everything we can to make this as painless as possible.

Thank you for your continued patience as we go through this transition.