Road to CA

We've been so busy with the conversion that we forgot to update the blog for the past two weeks! Here's what we've been up to:

• Constituent Management Collaboration Workshop. On November 3rd we had a 3 hour teleconference workshop with Carole from Datatel, going over all the PID screens in Colleague that had implications for the conversion, as well as lots and lots of valcode tables. For a topic that had the potential to be deadly, it was a surprisingly interesting and fast moving session.


• Conversion Consulting. Tuesday, November 4th we had our first of many conversion consulting calls with Rachna from Datatel. Rachna was very helpful in answering our questions, and she seemed pleased with our progress. We're looking forward to working with her through the process.


• Translation Tables! One hundred and twenty-two of them, to be exact. We're doing the groundwork for mapping Benefactor's code files and valcode tables into Colleague. At Datatel's recommendation we're doing this work in production so we won't need to re-do it with each test conversion.


• LBPMing. Of course. But Todd's making remarkable progress here and sees the light at the end of the tunnel.


• Security. We're starting to look at what security needs to be set up in CA. This is another case of wanting to do something just once, so we'll get this set up now in production and it will be ready in the conversion environment when we need people to go in there and start testing.

Yesterday representatives from Development, Alumni Affairs, the Registrar's Office and AIS gathered in Murray 120 for our Data Custodianship Workshop led by Anita from Datatel, who joined us over the phone.

We had many interesting discussions over the course of nearly three and a half hours, focusing on which offices will be allowed to add or update various sorts of data when we have completed the transition to an integrated system. We found that we had many points of agreement, and a few areas where further discussion is needed. Thanks to everyone who participated.

Our taskmaster, Anita, has given us 30 days to write a document detailing the discussions needed and then another 30 days to come to a decision on each point. She'll be on campus Dec 11 for a process mapping workshop so we'd better have something to show her by then!

Datatel recommends that we run through the conversion process three times before we do our live conversion - and we're just about ready to start our first conversion test!

Up to this point things have gone smoothly. We've had very few errors when running the pre-processes, unlike many other schools we've heard from. Todd and her crew have been able to clear up the few errors we did encounter, so we're heading into the first conversion test in really good shape.

This weekend we'll be re-creating our conversion environment so that it can be updated with all the work we've done with the translation tables. Assuming all goes well with that, we'll run our first conversion processes - Person and Corporation Demographics - on Monday.

Wish us luck!

Over the weekend Pete created a new clone of production for our conversion environment and this morning we ran our first test conversions. We were very pleased with the low number of errors we got at the validation stage. At this point we've completed M1, M2, and M3 conversions, all related to funds and recognition, and we've run L1 and L2, Person and Corp conversions, in validation mode. We ran L2 in Test Update mode, and just got two errors. That number may change when we have more of our Corps mapped to Colleague records.

After Thanksgiving we'll run L1 in Test Update mode and then we'll really have a better idea where we stand.

Todd and her team deserve a lot of credit for the low number of errors we've seen so far. The work everyone has done over the years to keep the data on Benefactor so clean is really paying off!