The Executive Team and one or two members of the Steering Committee listened to a PeopleSoft "Town Hall Meeting" for E & G Financials Customers. The purpose of this conference call was to update release plans for the Financials E & G products. PeopleSoft has decided to skip version 8.0 of this product and move right to 9.0, which will be a combined commercial/E & G version. By combining these versions, it is anticipated that customers from both worlds will get the best features from both versions. PeopleSoft also will be able to nearly double their computing resources toward this one product, rather than having to devote resources to two separate products. Kevin Horigan (General Manager of Education & Govt at PeopleSoft) has pledged that this version will be released on time - Quarter 1 of 2002. So by end of March 2002, version 9.0 should be hitting the streets. While a definite decision as to the direction of UDFS will need to be discussed in regard to this new development, the teams will forge on ahead a planned, because work that we are now doing will apply to any version.

The Chart of Accounts group has worked their way through questions generated by a team in the General Accounting office. This team has been given the assignment to expand the small set of chartfields already available on the UD version. These questions generated some healthy, productive discussion, and focused our thinking regarding issues that needed to be addressed. The results of these discussions can be found at http://www.udel.edu/UDFS/code-conver-questions.htm This team will now begin reviewing this list of department acronyms, and go over a list of questions generated by a review of the GL training manual.
 
 

Vendors have been successfully loaded into the UD data on Gibralter by Gerri Lear and members of her team and office. This updated UD information will be uploaded to the web shortly - a notification will be sent when this is available.

The mapping of UD data to Peoplesoft Fields/Panels/Records (tables) is now ready to begin. The downloaded information from the cross-reference query has been placed into an MS Access table which is available at http://www.udel.edu/UDFS/work_docs.html Instructions as to how to proceed will be forthcoming in a day or so. This assignment is due from the team leaders by 4/1/01. The results of this task will be used to map data, as well as point up areas in our current system that may not be handled by PeopleSoft.

A low-level effort has begun to try to determine which of our current object codes are needed for central and external reporting, and which are "user fields". The plan is to retain those that are needed for central and external reporting (and therefore need to be consistently gathered) as PS Accounts, with the remainder being handled as PS Class (User defined data field). Institutional Research, Budget Office, OVPR, and all the team leaders will be asked to take a look at this data and report which object codes they feel need to be gathered with each transaction - these will be considered for PS Account conversion. Currently the Budget Office, IR and OVPR are reviewing the object code list. The team leaders will be asked in the next Team Leader meeting to review this list as part of their office involvement, not as part of their team involvement. More on this later….