All systems go: IT stabilizes operating systems

20th March | No Comments | posted by Caleb Bell | in For Students, Faculty and Staff

Systems stability is crucial to keep any organization running. A university is no exception.

Three to four years ago, Lee’s systems were unstable and didn’t have the memory to run even regular, everyday processes. During high-traffic periods like registration, the system would lock up, leaving users frustrated and slowing down the entire process.

In fact, IT Systems and Operations team members would have to sacrifice sleep to keep things running, getting up at 3 a.m. every morning to reboot the system to insure that it had enough memory to get through the day.

So IT Systems decided to get the systems in working order. After Lee’s lease on its physical servers was up, IT decided to move everything to a virtual environment, Chad Matthews, database administrator for IT Systems said.

“[Since then] we’ve not had an outage during registration. We haven’t had many outages in any of our Colleague services … the systems themselves were bringing us down before,” Matthews said.

This move created multiple virtual servers rather than physical units, and gave servers exclusive purposes so as not to slow the system down.

There is a database server that IT created off of which users can pull information for reports. Since reports can involve massive amounts of data, using the production server to create these reports would slow it down.

The database server is specifically for reporting, so nothing gets bogged down. It’s also updated every 30 minutes, which means reports won’t suffer from a lack of current information.

IT also rebuilt the apps server from the ground up, which is the main production server. It runs Colleague, the system everyone at the university uses at one point or another.

Several test servers were also created. These servers are just replicas of the main production server; however, when new patches or updates come in, IT will run the updates on the test servers to make sure that nothing goes wrong.

If something does go wrong, they’ll know but it won’t interfere with the main working system.

IT refreshes these test environments every month, making sure they’re as close as possible to the system the university currently has in production.

This provides the most up-to-date information on how the production servers will respond to any given updates that might come in.

IT Systems now works with Ellucian as well, the group that provides Colleague, on performance health checks before registration.

“We basically stress our systems out to see what the peak performance is,” Matthews said. This helps show IT where they can tweak things to maximize performance.”

IT verifying department assets

29th November | No Comments | posted by Caleb Bell | in For Students, Faculty and Staff

The IT department is currently involved in the process of verifying all of Lee University’s technological assets.

IT has a list of all the assets – computers, laptops, printers, tablets, etc. – that each department uses.
This list includes serial numbers, the name of the product, the department where they’re located and the heads of those departments.

IT is asking the heads of each department to go through the verification process with the employees and faculty in their sector and report to IT. Though it is a tedious task, it helps IT to be prepared when leases expire and helps to expedite the process of finding and replacing different assets.

The reason IT is verifying all of these is to make sure that they can keep track of where each asset is, so when it comes time to end the lease, they won’t have to go on a wild goose chase looking for it. IT hopes to do this twice a year to make sure everything is where it should be.

New WebAdvisor options make employees’ lives easier

8th November | No Comments | posted by Caleb Bell | in About IT Staff and Student Workers, For Students, Faculty and Staff

WebAdvisor saw some new additions and changes this fall, making a few aspects of business here at Lee just a little bit easier.

Web procurement and benefits enrollment online are two changes that went live September and October 2012 after being under development since spring.

Kathy Jackson, business analyst for IT Systems, explained that these two system improvements make life all-around easier for those who have to deal with them.

Web procurement refers to the new way for staff and faculty to enter accounts payable invoices and purchase orders (sometimes known as vouchers).

These used to be filled out and approved in Colleague, which meant having to go through page after page to get where you needed to go. Now those approving vouchers and those entering them can go in to a single page on WebAdvisor and approve them.

“It’s a win/win for both the people who enter the vouchers and the people who have to approve them. Much more time efficient,” Jackson said.

Benefits enrollment online is also designed to make things easier for faculty and staff. Before, when an employee at Lee wanted to enroll in health insurance options they had to fill out a big pink form and someone had to manually enter all of that information to send to the insurance company.

Now all an employee has to do is go on to WebAdvisor, choose the options for coverage they want, and submit it.

These changes are designed to make the regular tasks of employees at Lee easier, and just a couple of the many projects IT has going in order to improve the technological environment at Lee University.

Business intelligence to bring improved data organization

| No Comments | posted by Caleb Bell | in About IT Staff and Student Workers, For Students, Faculty and Staff

IT Systems is currently in the planning stages for ramping up Lee’s business intelligence capabilities.

“By [improving business intelligence], you give the users a lot more control of what they see and how they see it,” said Jesse Houle, a programmer analyst and the lead on this project.

Business intelligence involves an organization using software tools to aggregate and sort tremendous amounts of data and analyzing it to help make smarter business decisions.

Right now IT Systems does that in the form of reports for the different sectors of the university. Once IT Systems finishes with the project, though, users will be able to create complex reports out of massive amounts of information.

Houle said that part of the process of improving BI is developing data warehouses. These will bring together information from various sources and pool them together to make reports easy to create, rather than requiring users to go to multiple sources for that data.

The new BI capabilities will be hosted on Portico when they’re finished, so users can log on and create reports. Users will be able to analyze and sort data on many different levels using PowerPivot, an add-on for Microsoft Excel.

PowerPivot will allow users to examine data in an almost infinite number of ways, filtering results through almost any criteria. This specification of data will help sectors pinpoint areas that need work.

This undertaking is not a small one, though. The organizational structure of the software will require much work to function correctly.

“It’s such a vast, complex setup that we need to make sure that we have those steps planned out very thoughtfully before we move forward,” Houle said.

With that said, IT Systems does not have a projected end date for the project.