Banner Cloud Migration Project Complete
March 16, 2023
Thank you to everyone for your patience and understanding while we underwent a successful transition of Banner and related Ellucian products to the cloud. Before 5 p.m. on March 13, teams in OIT, Finance, Student Services and Human Resources finished the testing and validation of Banner applications, and service resumed for all users. There are still some minor errors that the teams continue to address, but overall the process went smoothly.
The transition to the cloud concluded slightly ahead of schedule. Ellucian surprised everyone by completing the initial task of migrating the core database to their Managed Cloud 12 hours early. That enabled the OIT team to start system validations early, and the functional areas were able to commence their testing and validation processes Sunday afternoon. By Monday morning all the functional areas were able to test the system, identify errors and make corrections. There were very few issues, mostly minor corrections that were managed by the team members.
Banner cloud users who notice any degradation in performance speed or are unable to access services, please review the following:
- Reboot your machine to update any background processes.
- Make sure your machine is running on the most current version of Chrome.
- Clear your browser cache.
- If no noticeable improvement, consider a screen share to capture related data (i.e. linked services that may have 404 errors, etc) and a call to your security coordinator or your local campus IT office: UAA, UA/UAF, UAS
There were more than 100 people involved in successfully completing this transition, a major project which began more than 18 months ago. A huge thank you to everyone who worked Sunday and Monday for their dedication in testing and troubleshooting the new system and supporting the successful transition.
Banner Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software is the backbone of all the university’s financial, human resource and student systems, including all services accessed through UAOnline. It has been the ERP for the university for more than 25 years, and is common software in the higher education environment.
Most users will not notice a change after this transition, but make no mistake, this was an important and necessary step to create a foundation for future upgrades including to the UAOnline interface, student services tools and other advancements in modernizing our ERP. Moving to the cloud will also free up university resources to focus on projects, such as the Student Information System improvement initiative. The transition ultimately will provide greater long-term stability for the platform, and ensure that the backend is kept current and well-maintained.