IT Announcements

UAOnline and other Banner applications will be unavailable during March 9-14 cloud migration

February 17, 2023

Starting at 5 p.m. on Thursday, March 9 the final phase of transitioning all Banner applications and associated Ellucian products to the cloud will commence, with an expected completion date of no later than Tuesday, March 14. During that time, there will be absolutely no access to UAOnline or other Banner applications. 

Why It Matters: Great care was made in trying to identify a time for this interruption that wasn’t a peak activity time for student, human resources or finance system users. Multiple tests have been conducted including mock transitions to identify potential pitfalls and reduce the time for the transition as much as possible.

While users will not notice much change at all after this transition, this is a necessary step to create a foundation for future upgrades including to the UAOnline interface, student services tools and other advancements in modernizing our ERP.

What to Expect: 

  • Most Employees: For employees who do not regularly use Banner in their day-to-day jobs, the impact of this outage will be minimal. Employees will need to submit their timesheets early, and will not have access to UAOnline services such as time sheets, leave balances, tax forms or other self-service functions until Banner comes back online no later than Tuesday, March 14. When employees do log-in to UAOnline again, there should be no change in functionality, just a possible slight delay as the new site loads.
  • Faculty & Student Services Employees: Faculty and student services personnel will not be able to access student service tools through UAOnline over this duration, including the ability to add or drop students, adjust grades, access advising software like DegreeWorks, transcripts or other student data, nor will financial aid offices have access to payment tools.
  • Human Resources & Finance Employees: Similarly human resources staff will not have access to enter new employees, adjust payroll or other HR Banner activities during the outage. Nor will finance staff be able to enter transactions. External vendors such as Payment Net for managing Pro-Card purchases, and Concur for managing travel will still be accessible.

The Background: Banner is the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software that is the backbone of all the èßäÊÓƵ’s financial, human resource and student systems, including all services accessed through UAOnline. It has been the ERP for the èßäÊÓƵ for more than 25 years, and is common software in the higher education environment. 

  • Due to concerns about the èßäÊÓƵ’s continued ability to support the infrastructure hosting this critical software, leadership began planning to transition from hosting Banner ourselves, to virtual hosting using the Ellucian Cloud hosted by Amazon Web Services. 
  • More than 100 Banner users from across the system have been involved in the planning and testing for this transition since Oct. 2021. The transition ultimately will provide greater long-term stability for the platform, and ensure that the backend is kept current and well-maintained. 

Please visit the site and for more information on this critical upgrade project.