The detailed conference schedule (PDF) and session description list are now available!

Interested in our pre-conference activities? Check out more information on the Groovy and Grails Code Camp and the Mobile Connection Development Workshop.

Session List

Keynote Address – SunGard Higher Education Update
Dave Becker, Senior Vice President Product Management, SunGard Higher Education
Join us to learn how we are helping institutions become more flexible, more collaborative, and more ready to meet the future. We’ll report on how our Open Digital Campus strategy drives how we design, develop, and release the products and services that can help your institution move forward. We’ll also provide an update on the SunGard Higher Education / Datatel combination.

A Straightforward Approach to Integrate Blackboard and Banner
Brian Edmond, Missouri State University and Mike McManus, Missouri State University
Description: As part of our Blackboard 9 upgrade, we investigated the use of Banner Message Services to integrate the two systems. After some research, we decided instead to write regularly scheduled data exports using PL/SQL and AppWorx along with the Blackboard snapshot tool. The integration system consists of a series of full exports for all classes, all faculty, all students, and registration information (classes, instructors for those classes, and students registered in those classes). The system of exports was duplicated at two campus locations but fed into a single Blackboard instance. We also devised an exception system to handle situations that did not fit in the standard Banner registration model. Further, some areas on campus that are completely outside of Banner use the Blackboard system for various purposes. These data can be generated manually and then processed by the snapshot tool when necessary. During this presentation, we will discuss the challenges and victories we experienced while implementing this system and share some feedback on the reception the integration has received around campus.
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Accommodation Memos, BDMS and You
Al Arnold, Missouri State University and Tabitha Haynes, Missouri State University
One of the ways that Missouri State’s Disability Resource Center assists students with disabilities is by providing accommodation memos (letters) for students to give to their instructors. These memos list the types of accommodations that will be necessary to provide equal access to the instructional content and classroom environment. In 2010, we completed coding of a system that incorporated BDMS (Banner Document Imaging System) and a web interface for students to retrieve their memos in BDMS. This system basically read PDF files, extracted key data fields for indexing, and created PDF-based images in BDMS. Unfortunately, the system never went live due to security issues (our firewall cannot be opened to off-campus users) and accessibility problems with images, for visually impaired persons. This year, we created a system that is 100% web-based, works with popular web browsers, and does not have network or ADA-related accessibility issues. The web interface portion and tracking built into the BDMS-based system are pieces that may be of use to those wanting to provide student access to BDMS. This session will demonstrate both the BDMS-based system and the new system, which is scheduled to be live in December.
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Admissions Module Birds of A Feather
Ben Metzger, Missouri State University and Kim Bell (or TBA), Missouri State University
Description: Informal discussion of topics of interest to the participants.

Advancement Birds of a Feather
Denise Kettering, Missouri State University
Description: Discuss gift and pledge processing, phone campaign tracking, receipts and acknowledgements, reporting from ODS with ARGOS, Self-Service Banner for Advancement Officers, and/or any other Advancement topic.
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Advancement Prospect Tracking and Reporting
Denise Kettering, Missouri State University and Jenny Crews, Missouri State University
Description: Informal discussion of topics of interest to the participants.

Applicant Tracking System Implementation
Linda Stephens, Missouri State University and Nathan Betz, Missouri State University
Description: Overview of the implementation process of the PeopleAdmin Applicant Tracking System including lessons learned, workflows, training campus users, and success stories.

Argos Case Studies and Examples
Scott Svehlak, Evisions
Description: Argos has helped hundreds of Banner sites solve reporting and information access challenges. This session will go through examples from Letter Generation and basic reporting to Data Cubes and Dashboards. Using client examples you will see how Argos can help you go beyond basic reporting and get access to the information you need.

Auto-Entry – Let Your Computer Do the Data Entry
Matthew Gerst, Saint Louis University
Description: Thanks to “JT Autoentry” you no longer need to perform repetitive data entry tasks by hand. So long as the key strokes are consistent you can create a script of key strokes to perform the data entry while you sit back and watch. And the best part, JTAutoEntry is FREE! I use this tool constantly and still get excited watching it do my data entry for me.
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Automating Interactions
Armella Mitchell, Emporia State University
Description: How Emporia State University reduced the load on data entry staff by automating the process of inserting interactions for tape loads, inquiries and outsourced mailings. The process was automated through the use of a cross-walk table, scripts to identify interactions to be inserted, a script to create the xml file and AppWorx to automate the entire process.
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Banner Advancement Update
Carla Norris, SunGard Higher Education
Description: Join Carla Norris, Banner Advancement Product Owner, for an update on recent product releases and Banner community news. During this session we will also review upcoming planned releases and current enhancement project prioritization for the Banner Advancement product offering.

Banner HR: Keep it Clean with Baseline – Little Things Matter!
Diane Runde, Northwest Missouri State University and Sara Freemyer, Northwest Missouri State University
Description: Since implementation in January 2009, our goal has been to utilize banner to its fullest with minimal modifications. The results of our recent Sungard Banner HR/Payroll Health Check reaffirmed that we are succeeding in accomplishing our goal. We would like to share with others the “little things” that we are doing in Banner that help streamline our day-to-day processes. Join us to also learn how we moved Excel data to Banner for easier reporting while eliminating the need for additional databases.
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Banner Recruiting and Admissions Performance
Mike Hourigan, SunGard Higher Education
Description: This session provides a look at Banner Recruiting and Admissions Performance, a tightly integrated package of scorecards, dashboards, reports, and analytic capabilities that provides admissions and enrollment managers, institutional researchers, and executives with the information they need to track progress toward your institution’s enrollment goals.

Banner Student Inquiry – Customization within the Constraints of Web Tailor, SSB and INB
Donald Morfitt, Emporia State University
Description: Just like many other institutions, Emporia State University uses self-service banner inquiry for recruiting prospective students. This session will be a combination of high level and technical to show how we have changed the form to meet our university needs including the need for it to be more appealing and simpler for potential students through a combination of in-house customizations of the ssb and inb forms, settings allowed in baseline banner and Web Tailor. What will be shown is the baseline forms, the custom forms, processing, and how/why some on the changes were made.

Banner Student Retention Performance
Mike Hourigan, SunGard Higher Education
Description: This session provides a look at SunGard Higher Education’s Banner Student Retention Performance, a tightly integrated package of scorecards, dashboards, reports, and analytic capabilities designed to help your institution improve its student retention and success initiatives. With easy access to data from Banner and Banner Relationship Management, you can examine student success indicators, understand how your programs are or aren’t working, analyze trends over time, and gain the insight you need for more successful strategies.

Banner Student Worker Accounts – Management, Oversight, and Other Considerations
Tammy Roberts, Truman State University
Description: With shrinking staff and growing work, student workers are a natural resource to turn to for various administrative system tasks. However there are management, oversight, and other considerations that need to be addressed. This presentation gives an overview of how this is handled at Truman and opens up the topic for discussion as a group.
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Branding Banner
Sara Clark & Matthew Stublefield, Missouri State University
When implementing Banner, the question always comes up: what should we call it? There are URLs to designate, services to roll out, and hundreds if not thousands of people to train. A unifying brand can make it easier for staff, faculty, and students to understand, but if a brand isn’t fully implemented or is implemented late, it can cause confusion. Join us to learn about Missouri State’s branding of Banner and what we did.

Building a Better Help Desk
Jeremy Blades, Missouri State University, and Jonny Carter, Missouri State University
Description: Switching to Banner several years ago required us to switch some of the ways we did support as well. Missouri State University’s Help Desk is staffed by twelve full-time User Support Specialists and more than thirty-five student workers to provide twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, support via chat, phone, email, and in-person visits. Come and learn how we manage a 24-hour a day call center, keep everyone trained on the various systems we support, and track all of the work done to make sure we can respond to users quickly and efficiently.

Building Your Oracle Infrastructure
Gayathri Swaminathan, University of Oklahoma
Description: We will share how we combined our lessons learned from the following perspectives: – troubleshooting efforts – performance tuning – health checks – capacity planning and standardized our oracle infrastructure, achieved agility, allowed for customizations.
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Call an Argos Report from AppWorx
Loretta Sampson, Missouri State University; Marcha Mullins, Missouri State University; Aaron Guigar, Evisions
Description: The Argos optional add-on feature – API – allows a third party application to call an Argos report. Thus, an Argos report can be executed via an AppWorx job. Dynamic report parameters, if needed, are entered at job submission and are passed into ARGOS. Fixed values, such as the report identifier, are also passed from AppWorx into Argos. AppWorx can then also be utilized to FTP or email the Argos report output.
View the presentation slides – Missouri State University and Evisions

Creating an Integrated Electronic Application
Jennifer Snyder, Wichita State University and Kevin Crabtree, Wichita State University
Description: Come learn more about Wichita State University’s transition from a paper-based to electronic Application for Degree System. The creation of an electronic system enables the university to require completion of an exit survey prior to the student filing for their degree. A corresponding administrative site allows record administrators within the various colleges to track and process submitted applications. This session will focus on the structure of the Application for Degree System, the flow of data from Banner to the System, and an overview of the processing of submitted applications.
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Creating University Staff Ambassadors
Debbie Donnellan, Missouri State University
Description: Have you heard the latest about the USA? Not the country, the program! Our training and development program entitled the University Staff Ambassadors program (USA) is designed to help staff learn more about their University as well as provide professional development opportunities in the areas of leadership, communication, customer service, and problem solving. The twelve monthly program days are fast-paced, interactive and full of surprises. Find out how Missouri State University is creating University Staff Ambassadors!

Creative Uses for the Tape Load Process
Joan McCready, St Louis Community College
Description: Need to create recruit records from a CSV file? Need to load COMPASS test scores? The Tape Load process may be usable for both of these tasks. I will be outlining how we use Tape Load to create recruit records from the CATEMA (Career and Technology Education Management Application) database for students from our CTE service area high schools, and how we are planning to convert from a home-grown test load process to using Tape Load for uploading COMPASS test results.
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Dashboard: Visually Display the Summarized Information You Need
Aaron Guigar, Evisions
Description: Argos, the Enterprise Reporting Solution from Evisions, can easily display information visually in a variety of forms on a one screen dashboard so managers can view the necessary information they need quickly. At this technical session learn about how you can create dashboards with graphs and charts. Find out the best practices in planning a dashboard and get tips for rapid development. See examples of what other institutions have done with dashboards. Join us for this informative session.
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Dashboarding With IBM Cognos
Marc deLorimier, IBM
Description: Overview and demonstration of business intelligence solution Cognos 10.1.1 and dashboarding capabilities.

Disaster Recovery Round Table
Jim Taylor, Missouri State University and Charla Berry, Missouri State University
Description: Disaster Recovery planning is a daunting task for most institutions, especially for the first time. Come and share your experiences for plans you have developed, or get inspiration for those yet to be developed. We’ll talk about resources available to help you along and valuable best practices for starting, or maintaining, a plan.

Enhancing the “User-friendliness” of SSB pages
Rob Hornberger, Missouri State University and Brian Edmond, Missouri State University
Description: Missouri State University developed a method to enhance communication to the users on several SSB pages. The University addressed four challenges: a) instructors expressed concern about not having a clear confirmation regarding the submission of grades, b) the notification on SSB pages displaying a student’s confidentiality indicator status needed higher visibility and more specific verbiage, c) students with a hold needed communication that while they couldn’t drop a class online because of the hold, they could drop it by visiting the Office of the Registrar, and d) students entering the add/drop page needed a warning notification regarding the possible ramifications of dropping a class (e.g., loss of financial aid eligibility). Each situation required a unique response, but some consistent development techniques were used for all. The solutions involved the development of pop-up notification boxes, which informed the user of the additional information or action needed. The methods were employed without making any modifications to SSB pages. Instead, Javascript, used both as a screen scraper to recognize SSB error codes and an AJAX hook to access the database, was inserted through Web Tailor information text boxes. This presentation will discuss the challenges and solutions, both from a functional and technical perspective.
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ePAF in Self-Service Banner
Joy Hayward, St Louis Community College
Description: This session will provide an overview of ePAFs (electronic Personnel Action forms), including how to create them. The session will also include tips on using Self-Service Banner to improve your ePAFs.
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ESU’s Experience with BRM 1.5
Armella Mitchell, Emporia State University
Description: This session will cover some of the new features of BRM 1.5. We will also take a look at what we found during our testing phase.
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Finance Birds of a Feather
Pam Morrissey, Missouri State University and Clement Balasundaram, Missouri State University
Description: Informal discussion on topics of interest to participants.
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Getting a Business Intelligence Project off the Ground
Clinton Vickers, State Fair Community College
Description: There is a lot of talk about needing business intelligence at a college or university. How do you generate enough interest to actual move forward with BI at your institution? This session will show what State Fair has done to generate interest and kickoff BI at their institution.
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Human Resources and Payroll Birds of a Feather
Nathan Betz, Missouri State University
Description: Functional and technical discussion about topics of interest of the group. Needed functionality, how to best used features of Banner, what third party solutions are of great value, end of year balancing.

iModules Encompass
Carla Norris, SunGard Higher Education
Description: Engaging alumni when and where they want is a challenge. Hear how Encompass, a solution from our partner iModules, can help you meet the demands of your constituents through a market-leading online alumni engagement platform. What you will learn: How Encompass can help your advancement office improve online alumni engagement.

Key Steps for Developing Custom SSB Apps
Dan Schoch, The Principia
Description: If you know some PL/SQL and the basics of Web Tailor, you are well on the way to developing your own Self-Service Banner application. This presentation provides a summary of the steps required to expand baseline SSB functionality with your own custom SSB application. It will include both basic and advanced tips you need to know in order to move your solutions into Self-Service Banner. Although primarily a technical presentation with lots of code examples, the overview will give non-technical staff an understanding of what can be done within the SSB framework.
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Missouri State University Digital Professor Academy – Teaching through Technology
Jo Ann Mattson, Missouri State University; Nancy Gordon, Missouri State University; and Bruce Richards, Missouri State University
Description: The Digital Professor Academy is a community of practice led by the Instructional Designers and designed to provide support for faculty who are designing, developing, teaching, or revising online, blended and traditional courses through the use of technology. This faculty support program will assist faculty throughout course development by providing support on pedagogy, course design, and teaching through technology. The Digital Professor Academy is designed to support experienced as well as faculty new to online technologies through multiple learning paths and interest surveys.

MSU – My Learning Connection – A Partnership for Success with Avatar Academic, Inc. – Update!
Paula Wilhelm, Missouri State University and Kristi Oetting, Missouri State University
Description: Implementation was a success and we have been up and running since March 2011. We invite you to come and hear about our implementation and the positive strides we have made in the last eight months in supporting our University workforce, educational units, and institution in meeting their developmental goals with our new Learning Management System (LMS). Hear about our successes, best practices developed, and some lessons learned along the way of the implementation with our current systems and practices. Learn how the right technology can improve your organization’s ability to enhance learning opportunities for all, increase support to their workforce, and streamline management of compliance requirements.

ODS/EDW Birds of a Feather
Harold Beukes, St Louis Community College and Stephanie Turek, Missouri State University
Description: This session is aimed at functional and technical leaders and focuses on sharing ODS/EDW implementation experiences. This is the opportunity for many institutions to share that interesting discovery they made along their journey to a fully implemented decision-making solution. Furthermore this session aims to allow participants to recognize the products’ strengths and weaknesses and what they did to embrace it to ensure successful implementations at their institutions. The take-away from this discussion should be how to best prepare any institution for such a major project and once started how to manage all the phases successfully to alleviate delays and undesirable outcomes.
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Preparing for Flexible Registration Implementation
Joan McCready, St Louis Community College
Description: Your Continuing Education department has decided to implement Flexible Registration. What are some of the functional decisions that need to be made? What are some of the technical issues that have to be resolved first? I will be discussing our task list that was developed by our CE staff, technology staff and SGHE trainer as we prepare for our Flexible Registration implementation for Summer 2012 term.
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Preview of HR 8.6
Joy Hayward, St. Louis Community College
Description: This will be a session to go over the highlights of HR 8.6 – released October 31. We’ll see an example of the new pay stub and go over other enhancements in the new release.
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Registrar Birds of a Feather
Betsy Leighninger, Missouri Southern State University
Description: Do you have a question about catalog, schedule, registration, degree audits, Clearinghouse reporting, or another registrar related Student function? This Birds-of-a-Feather session will be an opportunity for functional users to ask questions and exchange ideas with other users in the Registrar’s Office. Session content will be driven by attendees.

Requiring Admission Application Fees on Self-Service Banner
Kim Bell, Missouri State University and Robert Martin, Missouri State University
Description: How we set up the SSB Admission Applications to use Banner and CashNet processing to require and then accept payment of application fees via credit card or electronic check while still allowing students to select a waiver type when applicable. In addition staff processing the paper applications with checks, cash, or money orders have method for recording receipt of monies and a Daily Deposit Report (via Argos) is automatically generated each day for use in reconciling and then depositing the money into general fund.
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Slaying The Beast: Building Banner Documentation
Matthew Stublefield, Missouri State University and Brenda Burrell, Missouri State University
Description: When talking with people from other institutions about documentation, we always hear the same things. “We know we need it, but we were so busy and didn’t have time!” or, “Once we’re done, we’ll go back and write documentation.” Come and hear about our experiences building documentation as we went along, what worked and what didn’t, and how doing a bit of work up-front on documentation is paying dividends and decreasing support demands years later.
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Student Module Birds of a Feather
Kim Bell, Missouri State University
Description: Informal discussion on topics of interest to participants.

Sweeper-Automated Data Validation
Dan Schoch, The Principia
Description: Sweeper is an automated data validation system our institution developed to help solve the challenge of monitoring data quality. Data corruption may be the result of inconsistent data entry, data entry allowed by Banner but violating local business rules, or unresolved bugs. Sweeper runs locally-developed SQL data validation scripts (coded with our institution’s business rules), logs errors for later reporting, reports exceptions via email, and reschedules the next test. Additional tests can be added easily to the suite of tests in Sweeper, and each test can have its own scheduled frequency. A custom Self Service Banner application makes test script management easy, and provides analytical graphs to monitor test results. Customizing our system to your institution’s needs is as easy as writing SQL scripts and inserting them with their job parameters into a table. Source code for Sweeper is being submitted to the SunGard HE Code Repository. Functional users and technical staffs will be interested in this valuable tool that helps monitor data quality. With Sweeper, we have immediately identified many data problems for correction, located data conditions that do not follow business rules, and captured data situations caused by unresolved bugs for immediate repair.
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Tape Loads – Creating Fewer Duplicates & Updating Fewer Mismatched Records
Armella Mitchell, Emporia State University
Description: The process Emporia State University uses to reduce the number of duplicate records created in Banner and to reduce the number of incorrect records being updated. This session will be a combination of functional and technical. We will review our common matching rules, how we keep track of the tape loads (what’s waiting to be loaded, the order in which the loads should be accomplished and which loads are in progress or finished), the steps taken for each load, and the Banner jobs Emporia State created. Emporia State uses Excel spreadsheets, Banner Procedures, CleanAddress, COGNOS, Access (for our most troublesome loads), and the Banner Tape Load process as we work toward cleaner data loads.
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Test-driven PL/SQL with Ruby
Jared Stilwell, Harding University
Description: An introduction to some basic test-driven development concepts and techniques. We will explore some examples of using Ruby and the RSpec testing platform to increase your speed and confidence when developing PL/SQL.
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There’s Something About JIRA
Jeremy Blades, Missouri State University and Jonny Carter, Missouri State University
Description: JIRA is a software product from Atlassian. While initially created for bug tracking, JIRA is versatile, suited for roles from ticket tracking for your Help Desk to task and project management for any office. We’ll be talking about how we use Mojira (our JIRA server’s name) to improve productivity and foster collaboration among different units, both inside and outside IT. We’ll also go over a couple of custom plugins and scripts that we use with Mojira to make it even more useful.

What’s New at Evisions!
Scott Svehlak, Evisions
Description: Find out what’s new at Evisions and about our products and services that might affect you and your institution. Come to this informative session and hear about the latest releases of Argos, DataMasque, FormFusion and IntelleCheck. Hear about DataMasque, the newest member to the product family, and find out how you can protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Find out why you should take advantage of our free upgrades to the products you are currently using. Learn more about our Transcripts Solution so that you get the transcripts you always wanted. Hear how we’ve improved our HelpDesk. Discover how clients are using the Evisions Forums to collaborate with peers and share ideas about the Evisions Suite of Products based upon specific topics and receive Evisions product/update information. Also hear about our improved CO-OP with over 500 pre-delivered reports, Dashboards and OLAP data cubes so you can get up and running quickly. Attend and stay up to date on all that is new at Evisions.

Workflow Replacing Paper
Becky Landkamer, University of Central Missouri and Julie Cannon, University of Central Missouri
Description: We will discuss our recent implementation of a workflow for the Graduate School, which includes using GUAPARA, populating drop-down lists, updating Banner: checklist items, advisors, comments, and application status, as well as using BDMS to remove paper from the process.
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Yes You Can! Creating Canned Reports in Argos
Sarah Williams, Missouri State University
Description: Are you looking for a way to summarize widely used information into a format that is easy for end users to manage? Would you like to be able to create an enrollment report that runs at the click of a button and displays enrollment counts by multiple variables such as gender, race/ethnicity, or student classification? Would you like to be able to compare enrollment for multiple time-frames? All this (and more!) is possible using the Argos Enterprise Reporting Solution banded report feature. An experienced Argos report developer will guide you through the process and best practices to get you started building your own canned reports in Argos.
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View handouts:

• Creating Canned Reports in Argos – FA11 FTC Student Profile
• Creating Canned Reports in Argos – FA11 Student Enrollment Report
• Creating Canned Reports in Argos – Handout

Computer Services Server Room Tour
Chris Rees, Missouri State University
Description: A tour of the Computer Services Server Room will be available at 10:00 am on Friday, November 18. The tour will last approximately 45 minutes. Meet at the MOKA BUG Check-in Desk no later than five minutes prior to the tour time; the group will walk to Cheek Hall together.