BOULDER CAMPUS COMMUNICATIONS

Every time someone asks us when the new Student Information System will start, we always have to answer it a number of different ways. To clarify, let me answer it several different ways.

First, to determine when the project really began, I looked through my files and found notes going back to February of 2004, when small groups of individuals from each of the campuses began meeting to assess the risk of staying on our current system. At this same time, a document was created to help identify what we can′t do now that we need to do, or would like to do, in the future to improve our current student systems. Wow - seems like just yesterday. In November of 2005, the first draft of a "Project Charter" was drafted. Eventually, in 2006, we had vendor demos for both the replacement student information system, as well as a new degree audit system.

Another "start" for the project began when the teams started working together. By June or July of 2007, there were fully functioning project offices - the first off of East Pearl Street for the Boulder Campus and the "MetamorphoSIS" Project Staff; then an office at 14th and Lawrence for the Denver Campus; and an office across the street from the Colorado Springs campus for their employees. The Degree Audit staff working on the new DARS (Degree Audit Reporting System) share some of this space, but spend most of their time working in their campus offices.

The "real beginning" for most of the staff and faculty on both the degree audit system, as well as Campus Solutions, is yet to come. The important piece to note is it will begin well ahead of the fall semester in 2010. Admissions will actually implement the new Oracle Customer Relationship Management (CRM) this September. The plan is to bring up the Denver Campus first, as they have no current CRM system, and then bring up Boulder and Colorado Springs in September of 2009. In addition, Admissions will begin using the new Campus Solutions Admissions module in September of 2009 for all campuses. Do you realize this is just 16 months away?!

The next modules to go live will be Financial Aid and the course and classroom section of Student Records. These will most likely be implemented in November of 2009, or 1.5 years from now! For all staff who enters course data into the system, you know that this entry usually begins in November and ends in February for the fall semester. Thus, all of you can count on training beginning sometime in the summer to fall of 2009 for this process.

The first registration using the new system will be Fall Semester of 2010, but remember that registration begins in April. And prior to April, there will be training for all of the staff in academic departments and other campus departments. There will be new ways to do old processes - drop and add; grading; waitlisting; advising, etc. And there will be new ways to do new things - prerequisite checking, for example. And last but not least, "Student Billing" should go live in May of 2010. Faculty and staff should expect to see student, course, classroom, teaching, admission, billing and other data presented in a very different way ahead of this time.

The first few degree audits are being programmed now, so expect to see training on this coming in the next year or so. Plans for this are under review now - expect to hear more in Julie Sharpe′s article coming out in place of mine next month (June).