GoWMU services down over weekend

Western Michigan University's GoWMU login home page.

By Megan Higdon
Western Herald

The university’s student information system was unavailable over the weekend in order for the university to update software. Services through GoWMU that were unavailable included payment and account information, course registration, and several other features that would normally be accessible on a daily basis.

Cognos reporting tools for faculty and staff were also unavailable.   The services were unavailable from 11 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 28, to 11 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 31.

“The software update is more for efficiency purposes,” said Greg Lozeau, director of planning and middleware services.

This software update did not to change anything on the surface but more of the “guts” of the system. To sum it up, the software did not comply any longer with the vendor’s, SunGard software.

“The main reason we are updating is because the vendor is discontinuing support from their product,” said Tom Wolf assistant director of applications support.

Wolf explained that it was important to update this software because if anything were to happen where the system had a bug, or it went down, SunGard would be able to access and fix the problem right away.

If a problem occurred under the old version of Banner, SunGard might be able to fix it. However, it would take much longer and the GoWMU systems could be down for days, leaving many students and faculty members frustrated.

SunGard would make WMU’s student information system a lower priority.

“The main motivation is to stay current with the software,” Wolf said.
Although the commonly used services like e-learning, and the e-mail accounts were still accessible, certain students still had a problem with the services being down for four days.

“I think the software could have been updated in a more timely fashion; it was inconvenient not being able to access information about my payment plan when I really needed to check it,” said student Amanda Folkert.

Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=14297

Posted by HeraldAdmin on Jan 31 2010. Filed under Campus, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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