Submitted by Marcy Smith

Please welcome our newest team member, Rogelio Echeverri! Rogelio began employment on July 21 and is our Senior Programmer/Analyst for Admissions. He has been busy learning our environment and tools, assisting Marcy and Mike Schuster with implementing the new Financial Aid Self Service product, and participating in our Admissions planning meetings with John Nordmeyer. In addition to supporting Admissions, Rogelio will also support Student Financial Services since financial aid is directly tied to the admissions process. Rogelio brings his depth of Banner and higher education experience to Middlebury, having formerly worked at Connecticut College, Mount Wachusett Community College, and Greenfield Community College.

Cindy has been working with the Language Schools on editing summer grades and awarding graduate degrees. She has helped prepare the Bread Loaf School of English, Language School, and Fall Student reports to the National Student Loan Clearing House. As students withdraw and are replaced by students from the waiting list, Cindy is setting up their student records and monitoring the student counts for the fall 2008 term. She has created the Advances Placement letters for all the incoming first year students and sent numerous files, edits, and reports to Institutional Research, Mailing Service, the Registrar’s Office, Career Services, and Sports Medicine. She has been working on a report of student counts by entering cohort for Enrollment Planning. Cindy is also learning Banner and Oracle security to become Marcy’s backup for handling security requests.

Liane is working on getting boxes in place for all the fall students. The real challenge of the moment is supporting Karin Hall-Kolts as we try to fit the large number of first year students who are coming to Middlebury in the fall with appropriate rooms. All first year seminars are now connected to a Commons. That means that students in each seminar need to be housed in a specific Commons. With limited space, this becomes quite an interesting puzzle to be solved.

Julie has been busy helping Human Resources set up and test codes in Banner to allow shift differentials for non-exempt employees, as well as getting another major project completed. Employees in Facilities Services will now enter their time worked on BannerWeb instead of on paper timecards. This brings the last large group of Middlebury College employees into more direct use of computers on a daily basis. (Dining Services employees began entering their time on BannerWeb a couple of years ago when their time clock system on the AS/400 was decommissioned.) It is hoped that this will allow electronic communication to be utilized by more and more employees and cut down on the need to mail paper communications around. Of course, there will always be some times when a paper copy is necessary.

Dave has been working on several projects throughout the past couple of weeks. To help Susan Simmons with a new Hyperion budget report, Dave created a new Banner table and a procedure that is scheduled to run each weeknight to rebuild the current fiscal year’s data within the table. Susan can then use the table instead of a Banner view for the report. The table provides a much faster data return time than the view. Dave also has created a new grant report per a request from Jai Shankar. Jai provide a copy of a report that came from Teachers College and Dave created a Hyperion SQR program to produce a similar report for Middlebury.

Marcy is managing database administration work together with our Remote DBA from SunGard, Nipesh Saini, and his backup, Sailaja Eswara. We’re developing a great working relationship and have found their services to be very responsive and helpful! Marcy has been working to bring the lockdown project to completion to tighten security around developer access to our Production database, and the project status was reported at the annual IT audit which took place on August 14. We’re upgrading our Oracle application server infrastructure in order to run the latest version of Oracle forms, which better supports Macs for folks running INB. We’re making preliminary plans for creating a Banner 8 test environment beginning in October, alongside the new Hyperion test environment for System 9. Marcy also completed the Xtender installations in every database and is assisting functional areas with a test setup of this new document management system.

John is working on a request from Public Safety to create a citation recording and maintenance module to replace the current shadow systems for open container and fire safety citations. John is making necessary changes to the ticket maintenance form to allow changing the violation amount and then recalculating all the summary totals affected as necessary.

Have you noticed the formatting of telephone numbers on college letterhead and in MiddPoints is now using dots instead of hyphens between the different parts of the phone number? There is an updated version of the “Editorial Style Guide” for Middlebury College and this is one item that was changed when the new guide was finalized. Although it won’t happen overnight, we are making changes so telephone numbers will be displayed according to this new format. Changes have already been applied to the Outlook address book and in the directory on the Middlebury web site. Please take note of this change if you are responsible for web pages or publications where telephone numbers are listed.