BroncoDirect/PeopleSoft News
A new BroncoDirect feature was launched during winter 2009 registration. Waitlisting allows students to put their names on a wait list for a class that is full. When a seat becomes available in the class that students waitlisted , the top qualified student on the list is enrolled in the class automatically. Satisfaction of prerequisites is checked when the student is added to the waitlist and again when the student is enrolled in the class. Time conflicts are checked only when the student is enrolled in the class, giving students the ability to keep a class at one time slot until they know there is a good chance of enrolling in another one from a waitlist.
Winter registration was a learning experience for everyone involved. It was necessary to experiment with the optimum number of times per day to move students from waitlists into classes – once, two times a day, every hour. We actually started with twice a day, only to later change it to every hour to move students from the waitlist to enrolled at a greater frequency. Some aspects of the program did not work as expected. For example, students with a permission number that waived prerequisites could get on a waitlist (good), but could not be moved from there into a class (bad). Faculty needed to understand the relationship of permission numbers to the updating of waitlists. Students found that they could no longer save a seat for a fellow student with lower priority in high demand classes.
We are still working to improve Waitlisting to get the bugs out. We are finding how to use it to best meet the goals of the students and instructors. Let us know what you liked about waitlisting, what you didn’t like and how we can improve your experience. For more information about wait listing go to the Registrar’s Office web site.
These past few months have been busy for staff in Administrative Affairs and I&IT. They have been collaborating on the PeopleSoft Finance upgrade. The upgrade started in May of 2008 and is scheduled to go live at the end of February 2009. The system will be unavailable between February 26 at noon and March 5 at 8:00 a.m. This upgrade will provide many software fixes that Finance system users have been awaiting. Most of the enhancements being delivered are related to the architecture of the application. This will provide greater flexibility in the future to take advantage of web services and the ability for applications to talk to each other in real-time.
One significant change for this upgrade is changes to Finance Web Tools (FWT). This system is used across campus by various people to manage their department budgets, projects, and grants. The system has been re-written to reside within PeopleSoft, which gives the campus a greater number of resources to support this important tool. The look and feel hasn’t changed too much, but some changes are being introduced to provide ease of use to customers. Special setup will be in place to ensure that users of the current FWT continue to have their access. It is important that every user confirm their access before they start using the new FWT. Information regarding the new FWT and special setup will be posted on the current FWT home page during the week of February 23, 2009.
In January the Organizational Development and Training (ODT) office announced the availability of a new self-service feature targeted to employees. Cal Poly Pomona (State) employees will be able to register online for currently-scheduled ODT programs. Registrants will receive an automated confirmation the day following registration and an automated reminder a week before the class. Employees will also be able to check their ODT training activity over the past academic year.
This service will be available through BroncoDirect (Employee Self Service – the same portal currently available to employees who wish to update their phone numbers and addresses). The first phase of this service roll-out is for Cal Poly Pomona (State) employees while access for our auxiliary partners will be added in the near future. In the meantime, ODT will be happy to continue handling registration for auxiliary employees interested in our programs. Full instructions can be found at training.
A new Class Enrollment Status Report (CESR) that contains waitlist information has been added. This replaces the Demand Report. An updated CESR report is available twice daily during registration periods and is in both pdf and xls formats for your ease of use. For our Hyperion users, we are excited to say that we are upgrading to a new version on February 19, 2009. If you need assistance with the new Hyperion system please contact the Data Warehouse team at datawarehouse@csupomona.edu . The team will then schedule time to assist you. While busy adding new reports and upgrading the Hyperion system we are also working very closely with Admissions, Registrar’s Office and Finance to create much needed dashboards that will be beneficial to many campus users. To access reports or to learn more about what is available in the Data Warehouse click here.
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Last updated February 18, 2009
