Banner Upgrade Day!
July 21 was Banner Upgrade Day. For about 6 months, Andrea Zinski led a sizable group of technicians through detailed planning and rehearsals of both technical and administrative tasks in order to perform the upgrade. This work has consumed nearly 1,500 hours of IS staff time over nearly 7 months. And that day's work was not the project’s end: the team still had one non-production Banner system to upgrade in the following weeks.
While Richmond has upgraded Banner at least annually for 30 years, each upgrade offers new opportunities for improvements. This year’s upgrade took advantage of new backup efficiencies which cut hours off the work to be done. Director of Enterprise Applications Lee Parker said, "I remain grateful to work with the competent group of staff, within IS but also in offices across campus." The Banner upgrade this year included the replacement of the virtual servers in all of the different Banner environments – a total of 61 virtual servers were replaced.
The Banner Upgrade would not have been a success this year without the dedicated members of these teams:
- Network Group: Will Wilkerson along with additional consultation support from Alison Harvey.
- System Administrators: Sashko Stefanovski and Vinny Petrone along with Don Babb for Evisions support
- Database Administrators: David Barth, Richard Williams, and Lennie Rimmer
- User Offices: Registrar’s Office, Human Resources, Controller’s Office, Undergrad Admissions, Financial Aid, and more.
Kudos to everyone who participated on the project! Their many hours of hard work made the final upgrade run smoothly, returning the different Banner environments to Banner users as efficiently as possible.Keeping Banner up to date means that students, faculty, and staff benefit from the latest features in a system that is used for student, financial, and human resources work.