Greenfield Community College

IT system upgrades scheduled for November 20-22

Faculty/staff email and MyGCC will be unavailable during this time

This is a reminder about our upcoming system upgrades (Banner and Email services) scheduled for Friday November 20th beginning at noon. Please check the status of our upgrades on the GCC homepage under announcements once the upgrade and migrations start for updated information and progress. Once the upgrades to a system have completed this information will be updated on the GCC homepage.

We will need to upgrade our administrative (faculty/staff) email server and our Banner student information system starting at noon on Friday, November 20th through the 22nd, 2009. IT has been working with IRM to coordinate this effort. These upgrades will greatly improve access to these systems especially from off-campus. Although we tried to make these changes over the summer, unfortunately the technology for these changes was not completely in place so we could not execute them at that time. It is always our intent to have as little impact on students and faculty during the semester as possible. Information on these upgrades is listed below and what will and will not be impacted during the upgrades.

Faculty and staff email will be unavailable on and off campus for the duration of the upgrade. (Student email and Blackboard will NOT be affected by the migration; we were able to upgrade student email this past summer.) We anticipate the process will take up to 2 full days to complete. During the migration process you will not be able to send or receive email from your gcc.mass.edu account. Once the upgrade and migration have finished notification will be sent out and email available. All incoming messages will be queued up and delivered once the upgrade is complete.

With the new email system come new features, some have been requested and others include more functionality when off campus, calendar availability, out of office settings and mobile device compatibility. It is important to understand that you will not be able to send or receive email starting at 12:00pm Friday, November 20th until the upgrade is complete. Again, this upgrade will only affect administrative email accounts; the student email and blackboard systems will not be impacted.

The next major upgrade to the Banner system is scheduled to be applied to Production on the same weekend. Banner access will be turned off at noon on Friday, November 20th. If all goes according to our plans, Banner INB and Self-service will be back up on Sunday morning, November 22nd, for user acceptance testing and ready for Production use on Monday, November 23rd. This will impact both Banner INB and Self-service – MyGCC. Banner INB and My.GCC will be unavailable while we complete the conversion and upgrade.

Banner 8, the new version of Banner, provides support for increased length of the address and phone number fields, increased functionality and other enhancements to Accounts Receivable, Finance, Financial Aid and Student. Testing of Banner 8 began in late August and will be on-going through October. A successful implementation is not possible without a concerted testing effort across campus. All Banner functionality must be exercised in the testing environment to ensure a smooth implementation. Once again, the systems that will be offline from Noon on Friday, November 20th – 22nd include administrative email and the Banner system including MyGCC. Updates and reminders will be posted regularly to our website under the announcements section as we approach the November 20th start date.

Thanks to everyone involved in staging and coordinating these dates and the Information Technology Staff for planning and preparing for these large scale upgrades.

Michael Assaf Director of Information Technology Greenfield Community College 413 775-1318