Tag Archives: banner

Interested in learning more about Banner? Join the Ellucian eCommunities.

Are you interested in learning more about Banner?  Have questions about best practices?  Want to connect with colleagues at other Banner schools to learn how they have addressed challenging problems?  Consider joining the Ellucian eCommunities.

Some of you may remember the older Sun Guard Higher Education ListServ and Banner Commons that used to allow Banner schools and users to communicate, collaborate, and stay connected.  These have largely been replaced and augmented by the new Ellucian eCommunities system which is now integrated with the Ellucian Support Center.

The Ellucian Hub can be used to get to all Ellucian resources.   If you’ve used their “Action Line”, you have a Hub account.  If not, you will need to have an account created.

Main URL to access the Hub:  https://ecommunities.okta.com

To sign up for Hub account:  https://clientapps.ellucian.com/signup

For help if Hub password has been forgotten: https://ellucian.okta.com/reset-password

To access eCommunities directly without going to the Hub: https://ecommunities.ellucian.com

From there, you should see a page with a list of “Getting Started” videos which you can watch to learn about the eCommunities system.

NOTE:   The information from Banner Commons was not able to be moved directly over to eCommunities.  If you had been using Banner Commons, you’ll need to do the “Edit Profile” step in eCommunities like you had previously done in Banner Commons.  Data about your name, e-mail address, title and company name come from the Ellucian Support Center so it’s important for you to have a Hub account there.

You’ll also need to set e-mail preferences and select the “Places” you’d like to follow.  You can click on “All Places” near the top of the page to see all the groups/streams and then click on the “gear” icon to the right of those you’re interested in to “Follow”.  If you “Follow in Daily Digest”, you will get an e-mail message with links to each posting once each morning.

If you have problems with this, please e-mail ecommunities@ellucian.com.

Interested in learning more about Banner? Join the Ellucian Commons.

Are you interested in learning more about Banner?  Have questions about best practices?  Want to connect with colleagues at other Banner schools to learn how they have addressed challenging problems?  Consider joining the Ellucian Commons.

Some of you may remember the older Sun Guard Higher Education ListServ that used to allow Banner schools and users to communicate, collaborate, and stay connected.  Although some of those older ListServ threads still exist they have largely been replaced and augmented by the new Ellucian Commons system.

From the Ellucian Commons website – “…The Commons is an online community where Ellucian customers, partners, and employees can share experiences, ask questions, find answers, and connect to a collaborative and informed network.  Articles, news, blogs, best practices, reference materials, document libraries, discussion threads, and more provide the community with tools to share, learn, explore, and create.”

See more at: http://www.edu1world.org/submitform/CommonsInvitation/

Are you reading this post via a feed reader? If so, read on…

On Tuesday May 31st we’re going to change the categories on this blog, so if by any chance you’re using a feed of a specific category, that’s going to break. We suggest subscribing to the whole blog for maximum enjoyment! If you’re not a LIS staff member & would like to filter out the more staff related posts, you can subscribe to the new “Middlebury Community Interest” category after May 31st. The other categories will be “LIS Staff Interest”, and “Post for MiddPoints” which will cause the post to be added to the MiddPoints blog too. All the old categories except “The Essentials” will be converted to tags for easy searching.
The LIS Web team developed this new scheme, following recommendations that came out of the open meeting about the future of the LIS Blog (including a call for simplified categories). The AD Team reviewed and approved these changes. We welcome your comments.

Banner/Web Prioritization Committee Introduction

We are writing to alert you to a new process for requesting web projects work from LIS.

When the new www.middlebury.edu site was launched this spring, with a new look and new features to support the activity of the College, we sifted through the many good ideas people had for improving our old website, and kept a running list of possible projects and improvements, which you will find here: go.middlebury.edu/web/projects. We are now turning our attention to that list. The new platform has also changed how our community thinks about the web, generating even more ideas. To make decisions about how we use the web to educate, communicate and run the business of the College, we need to engage in thoughtful planning that includes the perspective of all areas of the College.

To that end, we have formed a new group, the Banner/Web Prioritization Committee, that will look at medium-sized Banner and web programming projects to make sure we use our staffing and technology resources in ways that best serve the mission of the College.

The members of the committee are:

Joe Antonioli (Co-Chair), Library and Information Services
LeRoy Graham (Co-Chair), Registrar’s Office
Doug Adams, Center for Campus Activities & Leadership
Greg Buckles, Admissions
Tim Etchells, Communications
Donna McDurfee, Academic Affairs
Amy McGill, Monterey Institute of International Studies
Jason Mittell, Film and Media Culture
Jamie Northrup, Language Schools
Maggie Paine, College Advancement
Mike Roy, Library and Information Services
Susan Simmons, Budget Office
A student (TBD)

Once a month, this group will meet to look at project requests and evaluate them on the following criteria:

  • Does this help serve the academic mission? (teaching and learning)
  • How many people will be served by this? Is the technology reusable? Are there other departments that could, and should, use this? (all members of the campus community and beyond vs. one department)
  • How much time will it take to accomplish this? (One week or 18 months)
  • Are there other non-personnel expenses associated with this? (licenses, servers, training, etc.)
  • How hard will it be to support this on an on-going basis? Does it require deep technical knowledge? Will the solution grow with our needs?
  • Does it help promote administrative efficiency? Will it help members of the community to communicate? Will it save time? Will it remove complex paper-based processes? Does it keep us in compliance with the law or with campus policy?
  • Can it help us recruit and retain the very best students?
  • Can it help us raise money for the College more effectively?
  • Will it increase revenue for the College?
  • Have the appropriate departments been consulted?
  • Does it help the College toward its goal of carbon neutrality?

If you would like to submit a project request you may either use the online form:

online project request form

or you may download an electronic version of the form here:

web project request form

and email the completed form to Joe Antonioli ( jantonio@middlebury.edu ). Since some of the questions that need to be answered are technical in nature, we will be available to help you complete the form.

For the committee to have time to look at project requests, the form must be completed two weeks before the next meeting. The current deadline to be considered at the August meeting is July 22. You will be notified within a week of the meeting as to the status of your request.

We hope that this new process will ensure that we spend our time on the highest priority projects, and that the process itself will help us improve the College’s use of the web as a platform for accomplishing many of our ambitious goals.

Sunday Downtime Notice for May 23, 2010

UPDATE: Due to various concerns, Banner will NOT be offline this Sunday.

LIS will occasionally perform maintenance on systems during a scheduled window of Sunday 8AM-10AM EST. The following systems may not be available during that time this Sunday, May 23, 2010. If you have questions or concerns, please contact the Helpdesk at helpdesk@middlebury.edu or (802) 443-2200.

* BannerWeb
* Internet Native Banner

Sunday Downtime Notice for May 2, 2010

LIS will occasionally perform maintenance on systems during a scheduled window of Sunday 8AM-10AM EST. The following systems may not be available during that time this Sunday, May 2, 2010. If you have questions or concerns, please contact the Helpdesk at helpdesk@middlebury.edu or (802) 443-2200.

  • BannerWeb
  • Internet Native Banner

We are also planning downtime for Banner on Sunday May 9.

Introducing: The Identity Management Project

The Identity Management Project kicked off in December of 2009. The current project team (small ‘t’) is Tom Cutter, Adam Franco, Mike Lynch, Chris Norris, Carol Peddie, Mark Pyfrom, Jeff Rehbach, Mike Roy, and Marcy Smith.

The Identity Management (IDM) project seeks to organize our concept of a “person” or “identity” among our various systems (including Banner, the Active Directory, web-applications, hosted systems, and others). This project focuses on three facets of each identity:

Unique identifier:
Every identity would have a unique identifier. Currently, only people in Banner have one of its identifiers (guests and vendor-staff aren’t in Banner) and only people in AD have log-in names (alumni, parents, and others aren’t in the AD).
Unified Properties:
Each identity will have a set of properties (name, email, address, title, department, etc) that is consistent and available to all of our applications. Currently user properties may be different or unavailable depending on which source of user information is used; a person’s title is a good example of this inconsistency.
Roles:
Identities will gain zero or more “roles” that can be used to grant or deny access to our systems and services. We currently have no consistent way (in AD or web applications) of determining if a person is a current student, faculty, staff, or other role — the best we can do now is to look at membership in certain mailing lists like “All_Faculty”. With the IDM project, we will be able to access an authoritative list of the current roles for a person (visitors would have no roles) and will be able to ensure that access to services properly matches an individual’s relationship to the college.

In addition to organizing and improving the properties and roles of our current set of users (current students, faculty, staff, emeriti, vendors, spouses, and limited guests), the IDM project will also enable us to expand the number of usable (authenticate-able) accounts to include alumni, prospective students, and visitors. As well, we gain the potential to include users from other institutions via federated authentication systems such as Shibboleth.

Here is a list of a few things that will become possible with completion of the IDM project:

  • Rather than accounts being immediately deleted upon graduation, they instead would loose the “student” role and gain the “alumnus” role. These users would continue to use their same log-in credentials access alumni-only and public resources (i.e. commenting on blogs, renewing library books), but would loose access to student-only resources (i.e. course websites, JStore and other subscription library materials).
  • We will be able to grant access (individually or in groups) to many of our online systems for guests, alumni, emeriti, visitors, vendors, perspectives, and others with loose affiliations with the college.
  • Inter-institutional projects will be able to make use of any of our online systems as collaboration platforms.
  • A fan of Middlebury Hockey could create a visitor account to use for purchasing panther gear from the college book store, then come back and log in with the same account to purchase tickets from the box office, make comments on the coach’s blog, and fill out a form to sign up their kids for participation in the Winter Carnival ice show. Their name, email, mailing address, and other properties would be available to all of the systems.

Please note that some of these examples will require additional changes and development projects beyond the IDM project itself. However, all require aspects of the IDM project to be possible.