Banner down time May 30-31
May 29, 2008
Banner / Oracle database upgrade scheduled for Friday-Saturday
Banner and BannerWeb will be unavailable beginning at 12:01 a.m. on Friday, May 30 through late afternoon on Saturday May 31st for a major system upgrade. This will impact both Banner and BannerWeb.
If you rely on Banner for access to College data and/or are a regular user of Banner, please read on for additional general information:
GENERAL UPGRADE INFORMATION:
Approximately twice a year, Sungard, the company responsible for the Banner system, releases a major software upgrade. In addition, every few years we need to perform a major upgrade of the Banner database and/or hardware. In this case, we will be upgrading the database, and not the Banner application. As is our typical practice, this upgrade will require some scheduled downtime on a Friday that carries into the weekend. (Our last major upgrade which required system downtime was: April 2007.)
What might I notice as different? As this upgrade impacts the database and not the application, this upgrade does not include significant changes to look/feel or navigation within Banner. The majority of users should not notice anything different with Banner following this downtime. This upgrade introduces new capacities for managing our database, which Sungard (the purveyors of Banner) will make use of in future releases of the software. If you encounter any problems using Banner after the upgrade, please contact the Helpdesk.
With this upgrade we will continue our previously established practice, Friday downtime. As the size and complexity of our Banner installation at Middlebury has grown, we’ve found it necessary and prudent to consider some scheduled downtime as part of the upgrade schedule. Initially, we had one or two modules running. Now we have six or more modules, depending on how you count them. This means that much more to upgrade and test. And certainly, we’d rather have some scheduled Friday downtime, than some unscheduled Monday downtime. We will have a full day of downtime, beginning at 12:01 a.m. on Friday, May 30 which will continue into Saturday. With this and all future downtime, the date for such an outage is announced in advance, and the selection of the date is done in consultation with all major offices. Having a day of downtime for a major upgrade is a common practice at other institutions running Banner.
You may wonder what options you have for accessing data during the downtime. For those of you familiar with running reports, our reporting database, will be available for reporting during the downtime. The reporting database contains data approximately 24 hours old. Our pre-production database will also be available. It contains data that is also approximately 24 hours old. In general, if you are looking for fairly general data—such as an address or phone number, more than likely, one of these sources will provide you the information you need. You may wish to run other hard-copy reports prior to the downtime for your reference. The Directory on the web site is available and may provide the basic contact information you seek. If you have questions about where to access certain data, or your best course of action during the downtime, please contact Carrie Rampp, Area Director, LIS,
802-443-2451 or rampp@middlebury.edu.
You might ask, how do we assure the quality of the planned upgrade? Beginning in late April staff in LIS and elsewhere began testing some of the changes introduced to the database with this upgrade. Prior to the upgrade, in a test environment, staff in offices with heavy dependency on Banner have attempted to replicate all critical processes to assure they are working properly prior to the upgrade. This requires considerable effort, all leading up to a sign-off date for the upgrade. On the weekend of the upgrade, representatives from these same testing teams will test Saturday, May 31st, to again test critical functionality, prior to the system being made available again to the campus. Presently we are quite confident the upgrade will present no major issues. However, if you encounter an issue or question after May 31st, please alert the Helpdesk so it can be further explored.
