Central IT
03/23/09 PRISM Communication
The PRISM 9 Upgrade continues to move forward and is on track for the July 6, 2009 release. Here are a few of the activities the team has been working on over this past month:
UWC Development Environment – Second Pass
The PRISM Team is finishing up its work on the UWC Development Environment. The Central Office business units, the PRISM Developers and selected campus representatives will use the environment to complete their testing of the application and ensure it delivers the required functionality. The PRISM Team did experience some delays while preparing the environment; but those issues were resolved after the root cause was isolated and a work-around was identified. No significant issues have been encountered at this time that would delay the production implementation date.
UWC Training Environment
Activities to prepare the UWC Training environment will commence on March 30, 2009. The environment will be used to fine tune the security settings and ensure the appropriate rights, privileges and permissions for user accounts are properly set. The environment is scheduled to be available on April 15, 2009. Besides testing user accessibility, the additional pass will provide the PRISM Team another opportunity to walk through the upgrade and verify the upgrade plan is sound.
Infrastructure Improvements
FASTAR, the vendor that maintains the servers and hardware for PRISM is finishing the redesign of the infrastructure to improve the performance and availability of the services. These improvements include:
- The installation of new server hardware to handle the increased load of the summer and fall registration periods soon approaching.
- The implementation of load balancing technology so multiple servers can handle requests simultaneously.
- Moving the reporting functionality off of the production hardware and onto a separate server to help improve performance.
Financial Aid – Critical Fixes
Each year Oracle releases a bundle of fixes that modify the PeopleSoft Application to reflect changes to financial aid for the upcoming aid year. A number of institutions reported issues with the fix that Oracle released, so an additional fix to correct the problem was made available. Financial Aid and the PRISM Team is in the process of reviewing and testing these fixes to ensure there is no impact to UW Colleges.