Not everything we do in ITS is super interesting and fun. (Shocker, I know!) Some of our work is just takin’ care of business, and the SQL migration project for Colleague is one of those things.
Colleague is the primary Student, Financial, and Human Resources/Payroll information system for Widener University. It is the system that handles most of our back-office administrative functions. Some staff log directly into Colleague at their desktops every day. Many other students, faculty, and staff access Colleague information from web services more commonly known as WebAdvisor and Student Planning.
Our Colleague environment is currently operating with an outdated database, which limits us from making many improvements. For two years we have been progressing through silent phases of this project to move our data to a modern SQL server environment and SQL database.
We have completed the portion of the work that we can do without impacting others. Soon, we will make noticeable changes to the way some things are currently done at the University.
Our target Go Live date is Monday, November 26, 2018 and our intent is to make that day as non-eventful as possible. Our very best outcome is that nobody even notices that we changed anything over the holiday weekend. And to do that, we are going to begin enlisting the help of more of the administrative staff throughout the summer and fall to test, test, and test with us.
So stay tuned as we begin to announce upcoming changes. And THANK YOU if you made it all the way to the end of this article. Stop by the University Systems office in ACN and ask for your VIP gold star (while supplies last)!
