Recent Blogs

Your Story Could Inspire the HEUG HCMS Community

By Carmina Vasquez posted 5 days ago
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The Alliance 2027 Call for Proposals is officially open! I recently recorded a short message for our HEUG HCMS community to encourage you to share your experiences, ideas, and lessons learned. Take a minute to watch the video, then consider how your story could inspire others. 🎥 Alliance 2027 Call for Proposals Every day, HCM professionals across higher education are finding innovative ways to solve challenges, improve processes, and better support their institutions. In the video, I shared a message that I hope resonates with every member of our community: Don't assume your story isn't big enough. It is. ...
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What Wolfram Saw Coming: Computational Thinking as the New Literacy for Higher Ed Analysts

By Anna Kourouniotis posted 28 days ago
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When I wrote “Messy Data, Meet Computational Thinking” for the HEUG Connected Campus community last September, I was mostly trying to make sense of a very unglamorous afternoon that comprised of merging a CSV, a delimited text file, and a duplicate-riddled Excel sheet into something Tableau could actually read. What surprised me wasn’t that AI ( Microsoft Analyst ) cleaned it up. It was that watching the tool work felt like watching computational thinking come to life: decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, and algorithmic thinking, all on display in one real problem. Recently I came across Conrad Wolfram’s work on computational thinking ...
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XTend was built for functional users!

By Ron Anderson posted 28 days ago
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Attention PeopleSoft customers: Here are some facts about XTend from Lagniappe Software: XTend lives inside of your PeopleSoft environment. Easier to build, easier to test. Zero weeks of training — your team is building forms on Day 1 Better UI for all end users — clean, modern, works on all devices. All data is collected into a concise, lean set of tables—creating a clean, query-ready schema that makes real-time reporting effortless. Let’s schedule a short demo so I can show you how easy it is to build and test content with XTend. Reach out at contact@lanyapps.com or visit our website at www.lanyapps.com ...
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Part 3 – The Data Quality Assistant: Catching Bad Data With SQL You Already Know

By Anna Kourouniotis posted 06-25-2026
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A documented environment is great. A documented environment full of bad data is just well-organized trouble. So let’s close the loop. Data quality (DQ) work usually dies in the gap between “we should really check this” and “we don’t have a DQ platform.” Checks get written once, they live in somebody’s saved SQL file, and never run again. Then a bad data load slips through and we find out from a director’s dashboard instead of from ourselves. I don't like that! That is scary. How the agent helps The Data Quality Assistant turns your playbook into a helper that writes and explains checks in plain SQL. It suggests sensible thresholds and, just as important, ...
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Part 2 – The Data Dictionary Builder: Documenting PeopleSoft Without a Vendor Tool

By Anna Kourouniotis posted 06-17-2026
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Last time we met the Analytics Solution Consultant , the strategist of the group. This one's the workhorse, and if you run PeopleSoft, you already know the pain it's aimed at. Thousands of PS_ tables. Cryptic field names.Knowledge locked in one DBA's head. And the vendor cataloging tool is either out of budget or out of scope. So the data dictionary that everyone agrees you need never quite gets written. How the agent helps The Data Dictionary Builder works like a cookbook. You're not asking Copilot to magically know your schema. You're giving it the recipes. It walks whoever's doing the documenting through pulling structure straight from PeopleSoft's ...
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CVE-2026-35273 : When the Door You Forgot Was There Gets Kicked In

By Francisco Pier Png Yong Sing posted 06-13-2026
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CVE-2026-35273 and What the PeopleSoft Zero-Day Campaign Means for Higher Education Between 27 May and 9 June 2026, a cybercrime group called ShinyHunters quietly worked through a list. They were not guessing. They were not phishing. They had a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft — a critical flaw in a background component called the Environment Management Hub (PSEMHUB) — and they had automated scripts capable of scanning the internet, identifying every exposed PeopleSoft instance, and compromising it without a single login credential. By the time Oracle published its advisory on 10 June, the attackers had already been inside 300 PeopleSoft environments ...
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Three Copilot Agents Worth Building for Your Analytics Team

By Anna Kourouniotis posted 06-12-2026
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Part 1 – Meet the Analytics Solution Consultant (and a Quick Primer on Copilot Agents) If your work at a Microsoft institution, then this post is for you. And if you do analytics work in higher ed, you probably have more questions than tools to answer them, and more tools than people to run them. Over the next three posts I want to walk through three Copilot agents that can help with exactly that kind of problem. The nice part is they’re built on things most of us already have sitting in your Microsoft space. Let’s start with what a Copilot agent actually is. So what’s a Copilot agent, really? Think of it as a focused version of Microsoft Copilot that ...
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June 2026 Update: What Oracle’s AI Announcement Means for Your Organization

By Scott Antin posted 06-08-2026
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Last month, Oracle made some meaningful announcements about the future of AI in PeopleSoft. Russell Broom, Oracle’s VP of PeopleSoft Strategy, published a full recap of the keynote that covers the roadmap in detail. If you want the technical specifics on what’s coming in PeopleTools 8.63, that’s a great place to start: PeopleSoft Technology Powers Modern Solutions for Stakeholders . Having met with Oracle’s PeopleSoft leadership at the conference, here’s our take on what these announcements actually mean for the decisions your institution is facing right now. Infrastructure Is Not a Solution The throughline of Oracle’s generative AI strategy for PeopleSoft ...
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Almost there! Help me cross the finish line on my doctoral research

By Renato Cayuela posted 06-03-2026
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A huge thank you to everyone in this community for the incredible support you've provided so far! I am very close to reaching my target number of responses for my study on higher education professionals. If you haven't had a chance to take the survey yet, I would be incredibly grateful for 5 minutes of your time to help me reach the finish line. Take the survey here: Higher Ed Organizational Culture Survey
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Job Transition Announcement - Tom Johnson

By Tom Johnson posted 05-14-2026
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After 23 incredible years with Duke University, I am writing to share that I will be embarking on a new chapter in my career. I have accepted the position of Senior Director at University of Nevada – Las Vegas where I look forward to contributing to their mission and leadership team. My 2+ decades at Duke have been profoundly rewarding. I am immensely grateful for the opportunities for personal growth and lasting impact alongside such talented coworkers. While it is bittersweet to leave a community that has been my professional home for so long, I’m energized by the new challenges and opportunities that await me at UNLV. I want to extend my deepest ...
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Doctoral Research Phase 2: Focused Study on Higher Ed Professionals

By Renato Cayuela posted 05-07-2026
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A massive thank you to everyone who participated in my initial research survey! The data gathered provided incredible, actionable insights into how we navigate technological disruption and build operational resilience. Because this community is so incredibly responsive and engaged, I realized the data was pointing to a very specific need. I have decided to run a second, highly focused study tailored exclusively to Higher Education Professionals . As we manage complex community applications and face the disruption of AI, understanding how to best support and retain our highly skilled tech teams is more critical than ever. I would deeply appreciate 5 minutes ...
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Ride the AI Horse: Fundamentals First, Hype Later

By Anna Kourouniotis posted 04-29-2026
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Picture this: it's Tuesday morning, you've just opened LinkedIn, and there are fourteen posts about a new AI feature that apparently changes everything — again. By the time you finish reading, two more have been published. You close the tab, go back to your PS Query, and wonder if you're already behind. Here is my honest confession: I am exhausted trying to keep up. And I say that as someone who writes about AI tools, presents on AI, and genuinely thinks this stuff is worth your attention. The pace of change right now is relentless, and pretending otherwise would be doing you a disservice. That decision — keep it basic — is what this article is ...
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Payment flexibility as a retention strategy. Notre Dame was on CNBC last week talking about it.

By Jeralee Hahn posted 04-21-2026
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Full disclosure: I'm with Nelnet Campus Commerce, and we're part of this story. I'm not posting this to sell anything. I'm posting it because the conversation happening on a national broadcast last Saturday is one that I think belongs in this community too. Now We Know with Steve Guttenberg on CNBC aired a segment featuring Notre Dame's Pathways Program and specifically how payment plan infrastructure is functioning as a student access and retention tool, not just a billing mechanism. Against the backdrop of WICHE's enrollment cliff projections, that framing is worth paying attention to. What struck me about the segment was how the bursar's office is ...
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Extend content anywhere in PeopleSoft

By Ron Anderson posted 04-20-2026
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Attention PeopleSoft customers: Extend content anywhere in PeopleSoft with no customizations! Here are some facts about XTend from Lagniappe Software: Forms and surveys can be initiated from any field on any page without customizations. When initiated, it can pre-populate a new form or survey by carrying forward the context of the data from the page you are in. As, examples: A Grade Change Form can be initiated from the Self Service Grade Roster Student Emplid field and carry forward the class information, student name and current grade value. Admissions self service Accept/Decline can initiate an admissions survey for ...
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The Data Analyst in the Age of AI

By Anna Kourouniotis posted 04-10-2026
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I’ve been reading a lot on AI lately and I wrote my thoughts on my Substack . I thought it relevant to post about this topic here to prepare us for a deep discussion on May 19 at our next Brewing Sessions with @Scott Nishizaki , @Gaurav Ohri , and other Connected Campus champions. After listening to Ethan Mollicks’ audiobook “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI” and reading Luke Stanke’s LinkedIn article “The Death of the Data Analyst,” I realized that the data analyst's job description has not been formally re written. The role is transforming perhaps a bit faster than job titles are catching up. As uncomfortable as it may make ...
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Business Analysis Blog - The Power of the "Perfect" Screenshot

By Tom Johnson posted 04-08-2026
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Subject: BA Tools #1: Why Snagit is my most-used application If you’ve ever tried to explain a complex issue or a walk-through a specific workflow using only words, you know the frustration of the back-and-forth email chain, or the misunderstood Slack chat. In the world of Business Analysis, clarity is our ultimate currency. A picture isn't just worth a thousand words—it’s worth about three fewer meetings. That’s why the first tool in our "Software you can’t live without" series is SnagIt by TechSmith. How it’s used While most operating systems have a basic "snipping" tool, SnagIt is the professional-grade version that BAs use to bridge the gap between ...
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Business Analysis Blog - Software Tools You Can’t Live Without

By Tom Johnson posted 04-08-2026
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Welcome to a new blog series, " Software Tools You Can’t Live Without ." As Business Analysts, our days are often spent converting complex ideas into clear requirements, or translating difficult concepts into easily understood documents, and the efficiency of our work depends heavily on the digital tools we carry. Over the next seven posts, I’ll be highlighting some of the specific applications that I used to keep projects on track, from visual documentation to data cleanup to back-end requirement tracking. My goal is to share how these tools streamline the BA workflow and offer practical tips you can apply to your own daily tasks. However, every BA’s experience ...
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Reflections from Alliance 2026: A Journey of Knowledge and Connection

By Lidia Anderson posted 04-01-2026
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It’s been a little over two weeks since I returned home from the 2026 HEUG Alliance conference , and my mind is still buzzing with the wealth of ideas and insights that have taken up residency there. Like a much-loved book, the conference was filled with stories that resonate long after the last page is turned. A Hub of Knowledge Sharing One impactful realization hit me like a lightning bolt: the HEUG and Alliance conferences are hubs of intentional knowledge sharing and relationship-building that span the spectrum of higher ed. The influence of these events, along with the user groups and communities of practice, will echo far beyond our time spent ...
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Fraud from the (Associate) Registrar’s Perspective

By Dede Young posted 03-30-2026
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It’s no secret that application fraud has become rampant across the U.S. and potentially institutions of higher education throughout the world. Improving and evolving technology has made it easier for people to submit mass applications for admission, scraping data from the internet to seem legitimate. Why? The obvious reason is Financial Aid fraud. How are we combatting these fraudulent applications or at least identifying them as they enter our systems? And what are we seeing in the Registrar’s office? Plenty. Last July we discovered more than 350 new person IDs that entered our SIS in one nightly run of the application ...
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Is data a struggle with your current form/survey tool?

By Ron Anderson posted 03-30-2026
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Attention PeopleSoft Customers: Is data a struggle with your current form/survey tool? Here are some facts about XTend from Lagniappe Software: Data lands in your production database the millisecond someone clicks Submit. Data is never out of sync, because there is nothing to sync. All Data collected in a handful of tables for a lean, query-ready schema. A data model so simple, even your BI tool smiles Let’s schedule a short demo so I can show you the power of XTend. Reach out at contact@lanyapps.com or visit our website at www.lanyapps.com . #PeopleSoftCS #FluidForms #PeopleSoftHCM #CampusSolutions ...
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