IT Times: February 1998: GUI Banner: Two Months Later

GUI Banner: Two Months Later

Almost two months have passed since the implementation of GUI Banner. We asked two Banner users to share their experiences with the new system and the Banner Project Team to tell us about the challenges they face. The following interviews were conducted during the first week of February.

User Profiles

Buffy Tanner, Advising Associate in Environmental Design, has used Banner for two and a half years.

How central to your job is your use of Banner?
I couldn't do my job without it. The up-to-the-second information available on Banner allows me to give students very accurate information about course offerings, find out about their academic standing, and give faculty information about who is actually in their class.

How did you prepare for the transition?
I attended almost all of the classes offered by the Office of the Registrar. I felt that the Registrar's Office staff was really doing the best they could to prepare us and to respond as much as they could to our questions and concerns.

Did you ever contact the Banner Help Desk?
To be honest, Banner "freezes" on me a lot. I never call, because I've always got 10 students waiting to see me and it's faster to restart it than call and figure out why it freezes. When I did call the Registrar's Office in the first couple of days when I had glitches, they responded very promptly and the problems were solved.

How was transitioning to GUI Banner?
Actually, it was a lot smoother than I thought it would be. The meetings and classes helped a lot. It was beneficial to see and play with the new forms and to realize that they weren't all that different from the old. Installation was easy. The most difficult thing is learning all the new keystrokes. I still haven't memorized the new function keys, and that really slows things down.

How long did it take you to become comfortable with the new version?
It didn't take long. I basically plunged in and started using it. A couple of days before the switch-over, I did practice navigating the new forms, but it was basically learning by doing.

What is your overall impression of GUI Banner?
I like being able to get back into the system immediately when I have to quit and come back. With the old Banner, I had to wait approximately 20 minutes before being allowed to log on again.

However, the system itself is very slow, and it freezes constantly. Since it is a GUI system, we can't use the mouse to highlight and copy and paste information quickly and easily into other applications. I don't like using the mouse for this application - I prefer the function keys, and since the keys have all changed, that's a challenge. I can't print at all from Banner, never could. If I want printed info, I have to "take a picture" of my screen and print that.

Overall, the new Banner is about as user-friendly as the old. For people who really like using the mouse, it's probably friendlier.

Tracy Carter, Administrative Assistant in the Veterinary Medicine Dean's Office, has used Banner for 3 years.

How central to your job is your use of Banner?
It is crucial to the curriculum scheduling aspect of my job, about 50% of my time. I use it mostly for course scheduling, verifying course rosters, and looking up Course Registration Numbers.

How did you prepare for the transition?
I attended the class given by the Office of the Registrar on how to log on to the new system. Although I got logged on during the class, I wasn't able to repeat the process back at my desk. Without the class, I would have been even more paralyzed.

Did you ever contact the Banner Help Desk?
Yes, I contacted the Help Desk several times, always regarding how to get logged on. After my class, when I successfully changed my password and logged on, somehow it did not work when I came back to my desk. I had to have the Help Desk walk me through changing it again.

How was transitioning to GUI Banner?
It was helpful having the email messages sent to us with hyperlinks to the Registrar's Web pages for more info. It turned out though that I wasn't able to successfully log on to the system just from reading those Web pages. I needed to attend the class before I was able to do it.

It was super easy for me to install because our technical support contact, Shelene Richards, figured it out for us and sent us an email with a hyperlink to install it ourselves.

How long did it take you to become comfortable with the new version?
I am still not comfortable with it. I find the new Function Keys extremely difficult to re-memorize and I do not like having to use the shift key for most of my basic functions. Most difficult for me was learning how to log on to the system. It took several sessions before I understood what I was supposed to be doing, and for my password to work.

What is your overall impression of GUI Banner?
I find the new version much harder to use, mainly because it is so slow! I could run around the block sometimes while waiting for my keystrokes to kick in. So far I haven't noticed the mouse being useful for much of anything. The commands are harder to use because most of the basic function keys that I use require holding the shift and the function keys down. Printing is difficult, too. I have tried several different methods, but have been able to print only what is displayed on the screen.

Banner Team

Sandra Stewart, from Information Resources, leads the GUI Banner Implementation Project.

What prompted the upgrade to the new Banner?
Last year, SCT, the software company who developed Banner, stopped supporting the version we were using. In addition, like other campuses, we had to support the functional and regulatory upgrades that SCT sends each year, including federal regulations on the disbursement of financial aid. In short, the campus was faced with two main issues: the need to conform to various requirements from the federal and state governments, Academic Senate, UCOP, and vendors, and the very limited discretion available when modifying the base system. While campus needs drive our efforts to customize the current version of Banner, they must be balanced against the long-term costs of re-customizing each new release.

How well did the implementation of GUI Banner go from the Banner Team's perspective?
Not perfectly, but smoothly in the sense that we didn't experience any unscheduled down time for the system. A few unexpected events occurred with the application servers; however, the entire campus is never paralyzed when one of these servers goes down. We modified the system so that, if a service interruption occurs, users can log right back in and be switched automatically to the other available servers.

On the support side, since December 3, the Banner Help Desk Team has processed close to 1,000 requests for assistance. Those phone calls and email messages centered around four main issues: printing, speed, login problems, and forms navigation.

Some Banner users have expressed the following concerns about the new system. Can you explain what's happening?

It's not as "user-friendly."
Over the years, we've made changes to Banner here at UC Davis to make it friendlier and to accommodate local needs. However, whenever the vendor sends an upgrade, IT staff must re-install all the local modifications back into what was delivered by the vendor, and staff in the business units must re-test everything. The cost of making such changes (e.g., re-coding and re-testing) is so high that we try to keep the local modifications down to a minimum.

It's slow.
Many other campuses complain about speed problems. A graphical user interface (GUI) is by definition slower than a character or text application, which is what "old" Banner was. Here, we've done some tuning to speed things up, and the vendor (SCT) has joined our efforts to investigate this problem. Currently, our efforts focus on built-in security logic, and determining whether the forms can be redesigned for speed and the database tuned even more.

There were problems with passwords initially.
Yes, initially, the Oracle database rejected some passwords. We've added more error checking in the login form to communicate to the user why the password is not acceptable to the database. A list of "reserved words" (words that cannot be used as passwords) is available on the Web. If you have problems wih passwords, please call the Help Desk at 757-8996.

It "freezes."
We've corrected this problem by upgrading a piece of Oracle software on the application servers. This upgrade was completed on February 6. Since then, we have not had any more complaints.

It's more difficult to print.
We've made progress with respect to printing, but we're still in the process of addressing all the unique print complications with both Macs and PCs.

The new function keys are difficult to memorize.
This is true, and other campuses are facing the same problem. To help users, a help pull-down menu with key mapping for any part of the system is available on every screen. There is also a template which the Registrar's office issued at one of our Banner presentations to the campus.

Using the mouse adds extra time.
You may want to use the same online help pull-down menu to find out the key stroke equivalent for every mouse action.

It's no longer possible to paste data into a word processing document.
In the new Banner screens, you see not only data but also the screen composition itself. Your clipboard cannot copy the screen and the data as a text file because the screen is composed of graphics, not text.

Do you intend to make any improvements to the system?
We make changes all the time, typically by working with a team of customer groups who set our priorities. Each year, we complete all the mandated requests for changes, and make as many other changes as we can according to the priorities provided by our customer teams.