Tech-Talk: Banner Up-Grade

It’s that time of year again. The semester is winding down and students are heading home. Despite the holiday atmosphere, preparations continue for the spring semester. When students return in January, they can expect a significant amount of schedule juggling during the Drop/Add period. Despite this rush on Late Registration, which begins Jan. 7, activity pales in comparison to that of October’s Early Registration. Early Registration began Oct. 25 and continued through Nov. 5.

According to Kay Graham, Director of Administrative Computing in the Office of Information and Instructional Technology (OIIT), registration typically has little impact on GC&SU’s overall network. Delays noticed by students registering for classes were a result of the database server becoming bogged down with requests. The large influx of student requests caused the database server to queue the messages before processing. These delays were only dramatically noticeable when freshman registration opened on Friday, Oct. 29. On this day more than 800 students registered for classes between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. and 1,207 were registered by 10 a.m. Since registration traffic only affects the database server, network performance that was unrelated to class registration was not noticeably reduced.

This year’s registration process highlighted the upgrade to the Banner and PAWS database systems. The database upgrade took place from Friday, Nov. 12 through Monday, Nov. 15. Banner, which uses a graphical user interface (GUI) program, consists of a variety of processes for GC&SU staff and administration. PAWS is the web-based interface for students and faculty that enables online registration, student tranguides and several other processes. Banner and PAWS are developed by SunGard SCT Corporation. The upgrade, which was scheduled to last five days, was completed nearly two days early thanks to the hard work of Michelle Hightower and David Tanner, Database Administrators for OIIT.

According to Graham, a majority of the upgrade is transparent to students; changes in the Banner and PAWS systems primarily consist of enhancements to existing staff and administration processes. Despite the upgrade’s small impact on students, OIIT has made several custom enhancements to the PAWS system. Thanks to Stephanie Jones and Doug Moore, Software Developers in the Office of Information and Instructional Technology, students have access to their housing information, faculty grade distributions, and survey results, to name a few. Any item in PAWS that is marked with a circular Pawprint icon indicates a feature that was designed and built by OIIT.

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Mike Madison contributes to The Colonnade as a service to the Office of Information & Instructional Technology.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Dec 3 2004. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry