| A daunting upgrade 
Photo by Jeff Watts
From left: Letty Fleetwood, Jill Quick, Andy Squires, Joyce Deroy, Laurie Ambach, Ann Parambil, Alex Nyce, Miriam Radakovich, Joe Adamo, Mary Nelson. Not pictured: Jamie Barnes, Hanh Huynh, Paul Langhan, Liz McGuinness, Michael Mendelson, Vlady Saubert, Karen Wise.
Anyone can install a new piece of software. You just unwrap the box, put the CD in your computer, click “Next” a few times, and you’re done, right? But imagine if what you’re installing will by used by more than 700 of your coworkers, is vast enough to require its own server, and calls for extensive customization in a computer language you don’t yet know. This was the task e-administration faced last summer when Datatel announced that after 2007 it wouldn’t support any versions of its software earlier than release 18 (R18). The current backbone of the university’s Colleague databases, which house student records, course registration data, as well as payroll and other vital university information, would no longer receive updates reflecting changes in tax and other laws unless e-administration upgraded to R18. “We have no choice,” explains director of information services Joyce Deroy, who has overseen the mammoth project since last June. “We have to upgrade to R18.” Because AU uses what Deroy describes as a “highly customized” version of Datatel, the upgrade goes far beyond simply installing a new database and importing data from the old one. AU’s Colleague databases contain more than 6,000 instances of modified code to better fit their users’ needs and interact with other AU databases as well as the my.american.edu portal. Moving from R17 to R18, which uses a new coding language, means that all that code has to be rewritten. “It’s not like installing a piece of software on your PC,” laughs Andy Squires, a programmer-analyst who’s worked closely on the installation. “It’s a long drawn out process.” That process began last summer, shortly after Datatel’s announcement. E-administration began by identifying the custom code that would have to be rewritten. Then they faced a major hurdle. They had to learn the language they would use to rewrite it—a new Datatel-specific code called Envision. Luckily, systems analyst Jill Quick knew Envision from a previous job, enabling her to train the 16 other e-administration staff members in-house. “That was very fortunate. It would have cost us about $100,000 to send everyone to training,” says Deroy. “Plus it would have been disruptive. It would have meant taking everyone away from their other projects for a few days.” Still, finding time for the training while managing a full workload of other technology projects proved even more difficult than learning the code. “The big challenge wasn’t the training itself,” says Quick, noting that the process was spread over two- to three-hour sessions twice a week for six months. “The hardest part was just finding the time to get people together for the training. We have people who have a lot of work to do.” Once trained, e-administration staff started crafting the new code, completing more than 80 percent of the work over the last year. But that’s only been one part of the two-year project. They’ve also trained university staff on a new Colleague user interface necessitated by R-18 and worked with Datatel to test the new software—a process that often led Datatel to release several changes to R-18 each week. With R18 nearly installed on a separate server from the one currently housing AU’s live Datatel information, the group now turns its attention to a year of beta testing to iron out any kinks before it goes live. In about six months, once e-administration staff have completed in-house R18 testing, they’ll bring in staff from some of the 80 university departments that use Colleague. After they’ve thoroughly tested the new system it will go live in July 2007. Daunting as that all might sound, the staff working on the upgrade feel confident their early start on the project will pay off in a smooth transition. “Given the amount of work that goes into this, it’s real important that we got the early start that we did,” says Miriam Radakovich, a systems analyst who led the process of converting to the new Colleague user interface and continues to assist in R18’s installation. “That way we’ve been able to chip away at this rather than having to drop everything—because in the meantime we still have all the university functions to support.” —MG |
