MyU and PeopleSoft outage

On Saturday and Sunday, April 1-2, an upgrade to the PeopleSoft development platform, PeopleTools, will occur. While the upgrade work is underway, MyU and PeopleSoft applications will be unavailable. Specific impacts to note:

• PeopleSoft (and dependent applications)
• APAS
• Grad Planner
• MyU (and dependent applications)

Aside from downtime during the weekend, no significant impact for end users is expected. No action is required as a result of this upgrade. Access to Moodle courses and University email will not be affected.

The upgrade ensures that our PeopleSoft systems remain stable and secure, and is needed to retain vendor support. We encourage you to mark your calendars for the upgrade weekend so that you can plan around the service outage accordingly. During the weekend of April 1-2, updates will be available on the University’s Service Status page.

Student email lifecycle

Recently we learned that a student may not have an active email address, even though it is displayed in APLUS. Subsequent investigation revealed two issues: 1) APLUS displays an email address as a formula of Internet ID + @umn.edu rather than pulling email addresses directly and 2) many email accounts had been suspended as part of a clean-up effort during the December Google Application upgrade. Additionally, it was discovered that students with a leave of absence status were being deactivated. Since this is not desired, Academic Support Resources (ASR) is continuing to work with OIT to change this.

For those of you who use APLUS, please note that email addresses listed in APLUS cannot be assumed as active because of the aforementioned way that data is populated.

Schedule Builder enhanced with class search

March 20 marked a soft launch to surface class search filters in Schedule Builder for all campuses. Two rounds of formal usability were completed prior to the launch and an informal feedback form has been embedded into the pages of Schedule Builder for users to provide feedback as they interact with the new filters.

Changes related to preferred name and gender

APAS and Grad Planner now use students’ preferred names if they have entered one in MyU. Analysis is being done on how student records reports display preferred and primary name and gender, and how this information is used. We will be working with stakeholders to evaluate whether we should make changes to reports to reflect preferred name or to remove the gender column.

Internal audit

The executive summary from the internal audit of the Campus Solutions 9.0 upgrade is available to view. As a reminder, two surveys were developed to seek input from advisors and faculty go-tos (faculty support) on various aspects of the upgraded student system. Feedback was organized into three categories: general survey feedback on areas of concern, system issues, and common enhancement requests. If you would like to review the entire report from the internal audit, contact Sue Van Voorhis at vanvo002@umn.edu.

FERPA Q&A

Q: Can a company know who from their organization is taking classes at the institution? And, can they know the grades a student has earned?

A: It depends. If the company is paying for the students to attend and part of the contract between the student and the company is to share final grades, you could share this information. Before doing so, however, you should have a copy of the signed contract between the student and the company. If you want to report in the aggregate the number of students from a company, as long as it is over 5, you may do so.