Portal Q&A: Names, RSS Feeds, and Content

We sat down with Portal Project Team to discuss some recent decisions about the new portal.

ESUP: Let’s start with the name for the new portal! What’s it going to be called?

Portal Team (PT): We asked for name suggestions for the new portal through the feedback survey in the Portal Rough Draft. We found a lot of people really liked “myU.” We convened a small group, including people from our team and from University Relations, to talk about the options. We decided to keep the continuity of myU. The new myU will be a different experience, but the name will stay the same. It will be a front door for the great work the work streams are doing, and with compelling content for staff, students and faculty.

ESUP: What’s the most important thing for people to understand about the new myU vs. the current one?

PT: People think myU is just for students, that it doesn’t offer a lot for staff and faculty. That will change with the new myU. Through an improved user interface, the information you need to access as an employee, like your pay statement and benefits, and what you need as faculty, like grading and class rosters, will be in the new myU, along with things you’ll just plain need to know. It’s for everybody at the U.

Employee Class field sneak peek online now

The training team for the HRMS workstream has released its latest “sneak peek” video -- this one on changes to the Employee Class field in the new system. Check it out by clicking the image below, or visiting the Sneak Peeks page at z.umn.edu/hrms to view all four early education videos to date.

ESUP Video: Challenges and Opportunities (Part 3)

Santiago Fernández-Giménez, assistant program director for Communications, Change Management, & Training, talks about challenges and opportunities for the Enterprise Systems Upgrade Program (ESUP).

Enjoy!
As always, please send your questions or comments to esup@umn.edu.

Student Work Stream Finishes IDPs

University business analysts, subject matter experts, and members of functional steering committees from the Student work stream recently concluded nine months in IDP -- evaluating what PeopleSoft has delivered and what our business requirements are and making decisions on what the system would look like after upgrading.

This work translates to:

• 694 IDP sessions equaling roughly 16,621.5 hours
• 93 change requests
• The replacement of more than 26 homegrown self-service applications 
• The replacement of 100 UM Reports 
• Discussion of all business processes
• A 55% demodification rate

Thanks to a cohesive, highly effective team, in addition to the experienced guidance from implementation partner CedarCrestone, the University will benefit from a much more mature system. It’s also been an opportunity for staff to not only contribute to the project, but to meet people outside of their unit and home campus.

Associate Vice Provost and University Registrar Sue Van Voorhis, who serves as the business process owner for the Student upgrade and the Portal said, “We’ve been able to break down barriers. This is a very united group. Everyone is so committed to making this a success and going with our principles.”

Read the full story here...

Q and A with Arash Forouhari

(Update as of April 21, 2014: ESUP is no longer going live with Oracle's Identity Manager (OIM). Please read this blog post for the most up-to-date information.) 

Last week the Identity Management team agreed to move up their Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) deployment date to Spring, 2014. We sat down with the IdM project director, Arash Forouhari, to get a better idea of what this change in delivery date means for the University.

ESUP: It seems like there are a lot of terms surrounding identity management that may be used interchangeably, but really are different. Can you give quick definitions for Internet ID, OIM, and X.500?

Arash Forouhari (AF): Sure. Internet ID is a unique id created by an identity management system and assigned to each user provisioned in the system. An Internet ID is used to access applications, systems and resources. X.500 ID and Internet ID refer to the same thing but Internet ID is the University’s preferred term.

Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) is the University’s new identity management platform replacing X.500.

X.500 is the term used to refer to the University’s current identity management solution, which has been in production for the last 20 years. When OIM is in place, the University will discontinue using this term.

ESUP: What was the original implementation strategy and how is this new strategy different?

AF: The original strategy was to deploy (OIM) as part of ESUP go-live next fall and decommission X.500 (current IdM solution) at the same time. The new strategy is 4-5 months earlier than we had originally planned. Also, the new deployment model is a controlled, phased approach where the X.500 feeds and downstream systems are moved to OIM from X.500 one component at a time. This reduces risk and allows us to validate components individually.