When you move to a new system, it is not as if you cut over and you are done! Far from it… As I wrote earlier, we had a successful registration in November and immediately started planning some of the next steps. Our transition plan had us using Banner for certain continued functionality for mostly back end integrations. We were essentially duplicating some of the things in both systems, most of them automated. But as we approached December, it became apparent that we needed a bit more time to completely remove Banner dependence.
Since we continue to use Banner for advancement it was not the end of the world. We will be moving to Affinaquest during the next few days and Banner will be made read only at that time. This is a huge step and you can imagine the anxiety that comes with it. We have been aggressively moving various applications and integrations to use Workday as the source, but as everyone knows, with so many systems and dependencies, we are likely to find out we missed some. We have the staff waiting to monitor and take action as this happens.
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Everyone knows that I have been and continue to be an active software developer. After I wrote my last blog post, my ex-boss at Wesleyan (John Meerts) reminded me of the first homegrown registration system that I helped write at Wesleyan in the mid 1990’s. This was a game changer at that point and it created the trust of the community in our abilities. This allowed me to both write and lead several other major programming initiatives there which I have carried with me to other institutions.
But, as a software developer in small institutions with small staff to work with, you always encounter issues. There is a lot of excitement around software development, but there is also a lot of risk involved. The community comes to rely on them and wants constant enhancements which can never be predicted ahead of time. Also, with constant changes to the web browser and underlying technologies, you need to continually monitor and apply fixes. As a result, we end up struggling to support these in the long run. Also, when we write our own, our capacity to thoroughly test them is limited and it leads to mistakes. I just wanted to highlight some such mistakes that I have committed myself or have seen it done by others. For the sake of anonymity, I am not going to say who committed which one and leave it to your imagination…
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On November 15th, I completed 9 years at the College. It has been an enjoyable ride and the time has gone by a little too fast. We have accomplished a lot and we could not have done it without the dedicated and hard working team that we have! The list of Annual Reports is a good list to look back at the progression and if you haven’t looked at the 2019 one, please do so here. One of the major effort for the past 3 1/2 years has been Workday and now that we have completed the initial phases of Human Resources, Financials and Student, we will be concentrating on the post production work, which seems like a very different mode than the period when we were implementing. There are still a lot of things to do, but the pace is different.
Talking about Workday Student, I wrote about our First Year registration earlier, but the real test was going to be the time when all four class years register. They did it in November and by all counts, it was successful. (more…)
It is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM) and I am reposting most of what I posted last year around this time which are mostly applicable and I am amazed at the number of people who are still not aware of all different ways you can protect your information. You don’t want your important information compromised or your financial assets stolen. So, better to take precautions early. I have added something about SIM swap, a technique that used to be prevalent in certain foreign countries is becoming common here.
Passwords & Passphrases
I use fairly long and complex passwords. I prefer passphrases wherever they are supported. It is so sad that so many systems still do not support passphrases and are restrictive in terms of the length of the passwords. As a rule, I use different passwords for different systems. I will be very happy to privately share with anyone who is interested in knowing more about how I maintain/remember all of these passwords. I also avoid saving passwords for some of the critical systems and financial institutions in my browser’s password manager. They are safe and continue to be safer, but, if ever someone steals my Google Password AND bypasses two factor authentication, they will have access to all my passwords (paranoia!).
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I can’t believe that my last blog post was more than 2 months ago! That is how busy I have been, along with all my colleagues. As I have written before, we moved several additional processes to Workday Student this summer and you can imagine how much work this is. I am happy to say that given the enormity of this transition, things went well. Most importantly, the first year students registered without any known technical issues. We now have the ability to analyze the registration process in a way that we can make changes for future registrations to make the experience less stressful for the students.
Of course, no transition of this magnitude is without problems! So, I describe some of what happened during the last couple of months below.
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It all began in May when our internet connection would periodically drop. I would go to bed and get up in the morning and often I would see my VPN connection reconnect after a drop. My wife also experienced such drops and was really concerned about the stability as she was getting ready to teach her online course in June. I called Comcast (Xfinity) a couple of times and all they could do was to remotely reset the cable modem and that didn’t help. By sheer luck, I happened to talk to a gentleman during one such call who explained that the cable modem I had was a DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem and whereas it is OK, for the speeds we are signed up for (300 Mbps or so), he suggested trying out a DOCSIS 3.1 modem. I was skeptical, but hey, why not try it, especially because he was throwing in a free trial for a month. I would have to pay about $13 a month to Comcast after the free trial or buy my own DOCSIS 3.1 modem.
I went to the local store to pick up the new DOCSIS 3.1 modem. It took less than 10 minutes to pick it up and I came home to install this new device with a lot of hope. I called Comcast to activate the modem (a step I HATE because of the horrendous phone system that requires you to answer the same questions over and over again before you can get to a human being). Everything worked well and I told my wife to let me know of any connection issues. Three weeks go by and no issues at all! I am now doubly, triply, thrilled with the advice I received.
Then started all the troubles, some self-inflicted…
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I was at one of the best annual conferences – CLAC Annual Conference. This year it was held in Swarthmore College with a reception and a dinner being hosted by Haverford and Bryn Mawr College respectively. They belong to the Tri-College consortium, so it was natural that we were hosted in all three beautiful campuses. I love this conference for the networking opportunities it provides. We are very similar institutions in terms of the number of students, faculty and staff, the services we provide and the issues we face. But still there are considerable variations in what we do and how we are organized, so it is always interesting to exchange notes and learn from each other.
You can read my tweets from the conference here. (more…)
I am still an active software developer! I love doing it and I can’t imagine a world or a job where I don’t have the freedom to practice that. Of course, because of the nature of my job, I have to do it after hours and weekends etc, which I don’t mind because I just love doing it. The title of this blog is related to that and not anything wider than that. There have been so many cautionary articles written on how one should not trust everything on the web and I am not going there. I just want to talk about finding answers on the web as a developer.
I just marvel at how far we have come in the last 30 or so years. In my first job at Wesleyan University, I had to learn assembly language programming for the VAX/VMS system. I had a lot of experience in higher level languages such as Fortran, PL/I. My PhD thesis was on computationally heavy systems that required a lot of distance calculations between atoms. Our group decided to speed that step up by coding that part in Assembly Language, but that was for an IBM 370. I also taught courses at Hunter College on this subject, so I was familiar with the concepts, but VAX/VMS is a very different system.
And in those days, if you get stuck, it was not easy to get answers! There were a LOT of bound manuals that you could look through, but it took forever to find the right answers. You can also call support, but they were of little help. In order for them to understand and help, they needed to spend a lot of time to look through your code etc. and they just couldn’t afford the time. In several instances, we would just give up and start over in a different direction.
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Transition from one ERP to another is rare (at least until recently). When it happens, there is a sense of excitement, but a quick realization that it is an arduous task. Such transitions require careful planning as well as the cooperation of many members of the institution. And almost always, even the well laid out plans don’t always work, so, not letting the roadblocks that come in the way affect the morale of the team, but finding workarounds and the willingness to accept some compromises is essential. We experienced all of these during the past three years and I am very happy to say that we have achieved a major milestone and will begin the process of opening up Workday student in a couple of weeks.
It will be a phased approach whereby the students will begin using different features at different times. During the first phase, all students will have the ability to review their personal information and make modifications themselves. We have also moved the checklist for the incoming first years from a custom application to Workday.
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My wife and I recently traveled in Israel and Jordan and during last couple of days, we rented a car to drive around Northern Israel. The vehicle had this little gadget stuck on the left side of front windshield. I had no idea what it was and as always, I told myself “we will figure it out”. It turned out to be the Mobileye!
I was pleasantly surprised by the various things it did, which I will describe first. Then, when we met up with my wife’s colleagues, I learned a little bit more about it. All of this was fascinating for me, so I thought I would share it with you all.
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