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Tech upgrade conflicts with class scheduling

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By Maria Stockinger, For The Miami Student

BannerWeb was unavailable for students starting at 5 p.m. Friday night due to a scheduled upgrade that lasted until Sunday evening, preventing students from accessing the site to look up classes prior to scheduling this week.

According to the announcement sent to the campus community, "the upgrade will keep Miami's Banner system in compliance with regulatory changes, implement new features and keep Miami on a supported version of this important software product."

Many students who are expected to schedule their classes today wanted to use BannerWeb to check class availability beforehand. However, due to this scheduled upgrade, students were not able to do so.

"I needed this weekend to look up classes," sophomore Madison Cox said. "Now, I'm trying to squeeze it in the day before I am supposed to schedule."

According to Cathy McVey, the Senior Director for IT Communication and Customer Advocacy, IT services tried to pick dates that wouldn't conflict with the Banner Leadership team.

"The date for changes is always coordinated with all the offices that use Banner," McVey said. "It can be a challenge to find dates that work for everyone."

IT services get major updates for Banner throughout the year. In order to limit the amount of times the Banner system is unavailable, IT services tries to bundle the upgrades together.

"I think that they should've taken into consideration how stressful scheduling can be for us," sophomore Nico Adamski said. "But I do appreciate that they warned us beforehand."

IT services are very much aware that scheduling is going to take place this week, and they have a plan just in case the upgrade interferes with that.

"If we run into trouble during the upgrade, there is always a back out plan that would restore Banner to the way it was prior the upgrade," McVey said.

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BannerWeb was back up and running Sunday evening - in time for the upcoming registration window this week.

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