Student experience preview sessions

One Stop has presented several Student Experience Previews to staff on the Twin Cities campus and will continue presentations over the next few weeks. The sessions include demonstrations of class registration, bill payment, and viewing financial aid. The sessions also cover how MyU and the One Stop websites will work together after the upgraded systems launch in February. For more information including dates and times, check out this Upgrade blog post.

Office of the Registrar now in Salesforce

The Office of the Registrar has transitioned out of ServiceNow and into Salesforce. Emails sent to otr@umn.edu now go into Salesforce rather than creating a ServiceNow incident. If you are a ServiceNow user and have an item for Office of the Registrar or GSSP to handle, please avoid reassigning a ServiceNow incident to them.

Administrative degree clearance procedure

The final touches are being added to the Administrative Degree Clearance Procedure. This document will give colleges step-by-step instructions on what they can do to clear a student for his/her degree without the student formally applying for the degree. This procedure will streamline processes for the college advising units while covering all necessary compliance related issues that go along with clearing students for degrees.

Non-credit registration implementation

The contract with Destiny One, the vendor for non-credit registration, is almost finalized and and staff have been hired for the project: Santiago Fernandez-Gimenez as project manager and AHC liaison, Sandy Nelson as a solutions trainer, and Brian Knutson and Theresa Hillesheim as business analysts.

Portal Project Team Conducts Usability Evaluation on New MyU

The MyU portal project team recently conducted usability on the new MyU with 24 total evaluators; 12 staff members and 12 students (about half undergraduates and half graduate students). The new MyU’s combination of self-service access and information was seen as a positive improvement by students. The majority of students were able to successfully complete all the assigned tasks, and the names of the self-service tabs also resonated well. The most frequently chosen phrases to describe the portal were: “Clean,” “Easy to Use,” “Straightforward,” “Informative,” and “Understandable.” There were some usability issues discovered, which the team has analyzed and prioritized for fixing. The portal team will return to the usability lab in October to evaluate MyU with faculty and advisers.

Registrar and Office of Classroom Management joint meetings for colleges

Ingrid Nuttall, Sarah Kussow, and John Vollum have been presenting to colleges regarding academic process changes resulting from ESUP, including changes to class scheduling, wait lists, grading, and the retirement of course guide.

The meetings are designed to help colleges understand how these changes will impact them, share best practices for applying new processes, provide information about how and when to access training and other information, and uncover potential issues and related challenges specific to colleges and programs. Meetings have already been held with the Law School, College of Design, and College of Liberal Arts.

Where was everybody?

You may have noticed several ASR colleagues missing from their usual spots earlier this week. They were some of the more than 120 people that met in-person Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning to work on the ESUP Student system upgrade project. The group included representatives from all campuses and all areas of the Student project: academic advisement, admissions, campus community, financial aid, student finance, and student records. They heard from President Eric Kaler, Bob McMaster, and other ESUP leaders before seeing some of the student experience in the upgraded system and having some time to work as teams face-to-face. If you know somebody who was at the meeting, ask them what they learned!

New myU Portal sneak peek

The purpose of the new myU portal is to help staff, faculty, and students be successful in getting their business done at the U. Check out the new myU sneak peek and learn how the University community will use some of its features.

'Preferred name' update

You may have seen several stories in the Minnesota Daily during the past few months about the use of "preferred name" in University systems. In their enthusiasm to report on the latest update, the Daily got a few facts wrong, but it's still exciting news!

At Oracle's user conference last month, they announced that they will deliver an update to their code so that the preferred name of students appears on class and grade rosters! The University of Minnesota played a big part in this. The ESUP Student Records team built a national coalition around this issue thanks to the help of Product Advisory Group members Max Herman (ASR-IT) and Carla Boyd (Duluth). Max even wrote the white paper that Oracle is using for their development!

Since the delivery timeframe of this fix is unknown, the ESUP team is moving forward with developing modifications to the system to ensure that when we go live next spring, this long-awaited functionality is available to the University community. This is a huge win for our entire institution! Thanks to all who have been (and will be) involved!

Sneak peek: new self-service centers in PeopleSoft 9.0

Two "sneak peek" videos on the new Faculty Center and Advisor Center are now available. The videos provide an overview on how these centers will benefit users. The ESUP Student Training Team will be developing more in-depth tutorials and documentation of this new functionality before ESUP goes live.

ESUP Portal Project leadership change

Susan Geller, Portal project director, recently announced that she would be leaving the University to join Interfaith Outreach and Community Partners (iocp.org) in the role of associate director. William Dana, Student project director, has accepted the additional role of Portal project director for ESUP. William is very excited for this opportunity and planning is underway to ensure a smooth transition for both teams. Congratulations, William!

Student work stream finishes IDPs!

For the past nine months, University business analysts, subject matter experts, and members of functional steering committees have been in IDPs evaluating what PeopleSoft has delivered and what our business requirements are. Read more about all of their hard work and what's up next.

All Campus update

On November 11-12, about 60 people from all campuses gathered in Brainerd to lay the foundation for the next phase of the ESUP project. Participants reflected upon the challenges and successes of the IDP (Interactive Design and Prototyping) phase and discussed how best to move forward with creating business process guides and test plans (the next phase). The next phase will require some different approaches to maintain involvement from all campuses, as the process for creating these documents is different. Each of the student workstreams shared major changes that will be occurring to their business process or for their end-users as a result of the upgrade, so discussions about potential integrations can begin.

Portal priorities survey

If you haven't already, take a moment to fill out the 10-15 minute survey for the U's new Enterprise Portal. The deadline is May 20th.

This survey is just one tool to allow the Portal team to begin to gauge the "opportunities" that have been identified so far. They are still listening and collecting, and will continue to do so, so it's important to continue to give them your feedback, ideas, and thoughts. They want to deliver the best possible portal and can only achieve that by hearing from everyone. Please share the survey widely with your networks.

We did it!

Publish the 2012-2014 undergraduate catalog, that is. If you have a chance, check it out! After months of revamping the look and feel of the archival PDFs, we finally finished. Woohoo!

Please complete an evaluation of the customer service event

There is still time to complete your evaluation of last month's internal customer service kick-off event. We have received useful feedback and several good ideas for future resource development. If you haven't already completed the event evaluation, it remains available for your feedback.

Thank you,
The Customer Service Team
Gary Andersen
Olga Kavun-Wozniak
Carrie Otto
Toni Pangborn
Didi Nguyen
Paula Seeger
Jackee Wernersbach

Please review the test site for the new Intranet

It's been almost five years since the launch of the ASR website, and a lot has changed in terms of the technology we have to support our web presence. As a precursor to giving the ASR website a face lift, communications and web staff have separated the content that is truly internal into a separate intranet. (This step is essential before we can revamp our website because the software that currently supports it is no longer feasible to maintain.) They are asking for you to review the test site and see what you think.

Note the custom search bar at the top that allows you to search both the intranet and the current ASR website for content. This means once the Intranet goes live, you should still be able to use it as your first choice to find resources related to your work in ASR.

Please send any feedback on the site to Ingrid Nuttall by Wednesday, October 31.

Once the intranet goes live, the content that is duplicated on the ASR website will be removed, and work will begin in earnest to update asr.umn.edu. Questions about this next phase can also be directed to Ingrid.

Changes to U of M sign-in pages

On Friday, September 28, 2012, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) updated the University of Minnesota sign-in page. Due to feedback from the University community, the guest account creation and student account initiation links now send users to a new page that provides more detail about how to choose the proper account.

Enterprise System Upgrade Project kick-off on October 16

Save the date for the the Enterprise System Upgrade Project (ESUP) Kickoff Event on Tuesday, October 16, at 1 p.m.

The event will begin with an opening session that provides an overview of the project for ESUP team members, as well as managers, University leadership, and other key stakeholders. This will be followed by more detailed sessions specifically for ESUP team members, discussing methodology, roles and responsibilities, and more.

Kickoff planning is underway, and more details about the location and agenda will be shared as they are finalized. For now, staff who will be working on the project full-time should plan to attend from 1 to 4 p.m. University leaders and others not formally on the project team can plan to leave after the opening session or follow the discussions online via streaming video.

Implementation partner presentation for the PeopleSoft upgrade

When the funding for the PeopleSoft upgrade was approved earlier this month, Cedar Crestone was also approved as our implementation partner. For more information about Cedar Crestone, including short biographies of several of their consultants, check out this PowerPoint presentation.