MyCampus Upgrade - In Depth: Why?
Much of the focus during 2017/18 is a major upgrade of the student system to maintain Oracle support for security and regulations, as well as allow for adoption of future functionality.
When the University of Glasgow implemented the Oracle's PeopleSoft Campus Solutions, know at the University as MyCampus, in 2011 Version 9.0 was the most current version of the application. In fact at this time the vendor did not have plans for a version 9.2 but instead had moved to a continuous delivery model designed to minimize operational disruption and capital costs that higher education institutions often experience with major upgrades to their student information systems. Under this model Oracle delivered periodic application Feature Packs enabling institutions to access and implement new functionality to meet immediate needs while migrating gradually to the infrastructure they needed to leverage newer, more robust and flexible technologies.
However after implementing or upgrading to CS 9.0, many institutions did not implement the new 9.0 features, often finding it difficult to secure institutional investment for enhancement projects. Partly in response to this challenge but also to take advantage of significant improvements to both the underlying infrastructure of the PeopleSoft application along with tremendous advancement to the user experience, Oracle released Version 9.2 was released in December 2015.
Vendor support on CS 9.0 will end in December 2019. Delivering our upgrade now positions the University of Glasgow to be on the latest version of Campus Solutions and allows us to follow the least complex upgrade path: the longer an institution waits to upgrade to CS 9.2, the more features and capabilities it will be missing as all future releases through the continuous delivery model will assume CS 9.2 as the baseline.
The upgrade from CS 9.0 to CS 9.2 was designed to be an upgrade with a lower impact to your organization than upgrades between earlier versions. The first and second stages of the upgrade from CS 9.0 to CS 9.2 is being managed as a “technical only” upgrade. Tables and record structure are generally unchanged between CS 9.0 and CS 9.2, and as we are already on CS 9.0 and are current with bundles we are at the same codeline as CS 9.2.
As such, after the second stage of the upgrade in February students, and staff will initially only notice small changes. However this vital stage of the upgrade begins the longer process of transforming the user experience by providing the platform that will significantly improve the interactions of students and staff with the system and enable the University to extract maximum value from the investment in Oracle technology.