What has your SF PAG been doing for the past three months?
The third quarter (October to December) is when Alliance 2011 Track submissions and the PAG nominations are reviewed and accepted. The Track Chair, Karen Bailey and Co-Chair Ken Pattillo compiled the information for over 30 session submissions and the PAG selected those that matched up best with what the SF user community requested via last year’s conference evaluations and in response to our requests for session topics on the SF List. We are happy that the SF track generates so much interest and want to express our thanks to all of you who submitted sessions for a wealth of quality topics. We are also impressed with the list of PAG nominees received from users who are willing to share their time and talents with the SF Community. The PAG has made their selections and forwarded those names to the Board and Oracle for final approval. Expect an announcement of new PAG members early in 2011.
Goals – Progress Made:
Maintain a strong line of communication with Oracle on current issues specific to Student Financials, while considering future development and industry trends.
The Third Party Billing working group submitted their draft to the SF PAG for review in October/November 2010. There are a couple of follow up questions left to resolve and the white paper will be submitted next quarter. Look for an announcement on the SF list that it is ready for your review on HEUG Online in the coming months.
Facilitate conversations with Oracle to implement mandatory software updates required to comply with global regulations and deadlines impacting colleges and universities such as: PCI compliance, 1098-T, HELP loans, and other governmental regulations.
No update this quarter.
Provide feedback to Oracle on the new release strategy for Campus Solutions. Oracle’s new release strategy removes the previous concept of large ‘releases’ or ‘versions’ and instead replaces it with ongoing ‘feature pack’ releases (integrated with the standard maintenance releases). The PAG aims to engage with the SF community and collate information on the success of this new strategy over time.
Oracle created a working group to follow up on the acceptance of the delivery model and the SF PAG nominated Maria Lindquist from UW-Colleges and Maureen Knight-Burrell from Northwestern University to participate in this review.
Continue partnership with Oracle and the Student Financials community.
- Engage the SF community to use the HEUG Issue Tracker to communicate their ideas for enhancements and new features needed in the product. Encourage users to vote and comment on submitted issues in order for the PAG to have timely information on which issues are most important.
- Contribute to the development of the SF product through participation in customer guide/focus groups and other Oracle initiated teams.
- Participate in developer/strategy questionnaires.
- Seek out SF community experts to assist with compiling best practices and to document business requirements for the areas of the product that continually rise to the top of the SF Issues list.
- Provide information to the SF community related to new features and product issues.
The SF PAG continues to review the information that users enter into the Issue Tracker and wants to encourage users to vote and comment on the issues. A number of users have expressed concern with how various processes related to Third Party Contracts were performing. From the list discussion, there were a number of schools who had been struggling with this issue, but absolutely nothing entered to Issue Tracker. The SF PAG thanks schools who have filed cases, contributed to the issue comments and would like to encourage others to share information on how they may have addressed these performance issues or add to open issues with TP performance.
Our next working group related to the Post 911 Veterans issue will kick off early in 2011 -planning is underway.
Training Opportunities: You asked for ways that we share more knowledge with SF users and we delivered! Our first webinar related to payment application was held on October 20, 2010, attended by 69 users and was followed by a Q and A session on October 27th with 43 users in attendance. In the second session, we offered the option of sharing an open mike so others could ask questions directly. This was a new experiment for webinar offerings where questions could be collected ahead of time or the chat feature on the webinar tool is used. According to the survey responses, users were pleased with options offered for submitting their questions. In December 2010, 1098-T self-service was our second topic with 114 registered users in attendance. The SF PAG will continue to make plans to offer more webinars in the future.
The SF PAG is looking for your input on future webinar topics. Please send to any PAG member.
Continue to work with cross-PAG teams to provide the best input to Oracle on cross-functional business processes.
Participants from the SF PAG have been identified as contacts for the GL PAG working group to tackle reconciliation issues. The SF PAG is working on a cross-PAG session related to Veterans Post 911 issues for the PAG Summit in March.
Top SF Issues 2010-2011 and Actions Taken:
- Self Service – offered webinar on 1098-T self-service.
- Third Party Contract/External Org Improvements – Third Party Working Group white paper reviewed by the PAG. Requested more information from users via the Issue Tracker for TP performance issues.
- Refunding – no activity this quarter.
- Archiving/Purging SF Tables – no activity this quarter.
- Veterans Issues --- The SF PAG is planning for the next working group to address common Veterans issues and identify best practices. Group will start in early 2011.
Alliance Track: The SF Track is set for Alliance 2011.
Newsletter: Newsletter was sent in November 2010 along with extra communications about the Oracle Release Value Proposition and advertisements for the SF Webinars in October and December.