MySlice began a routine upgrade Thursday night, leaving a number of features inaccessible to students and faculty. The upgrade process will continue throughout the weekend with limited access to certain functions today and Saturday, and complete inaccessibility on Sunday.

During the upgrade, MySlice will be mostly unavailable to users. All self-service links, such as financial aid and enrollment information, were taken down Thursday night. Today, users can view that information but are unable to change it. Saturday the links will be taken down again, and on Sunday, the Web site will be completely shut down to users.

Users were alerted of the inaccessibility with a red warning banner when logging on to the Web site, and an e-mail was sent out notifying users of the shut down two days before the upgrade began.

Allison Nast, a junior television, radio and film major who uses the Web site to check her financial aid, said she’s annoyed that MySlice will be inaccessible this weekend.

‘It’s quite irritating that they have to do it for the entire weekend,’ she said. ‘Usually it takes one night, when normal people are sleeping anyway.’

But Chris Finkle, communications manager for SU’s Information and Technology Services, said making MySlice unusable is a necessary part of the upgrade process.

‘It would be like trying to drive your car while the mechanic is underneath it,’ Finkle said. ‘For a period of time, we have to not use it because we’re working in it.’

Most of the new features are related to class registration. Some include a ‘My Planner’ application that will allow students to map out their schedules before registering for class, and a ‘Shopping Cart’ that will allow students to put all the classes they want in their shopping cart and register for everything at once, as opposed to the current system of registering for each class individually.

One of the disadvantages of shutting down the Web site for the weekend is that it affects the Crisis Alert System. Students and faculty will still be alerted in case of an emergency, but students who wish to update their emergency contact information will be unable to do so. ‘We’re upgrading the software in the same way that you would upgrade Windows or Mac OS on your PC,’ Finkle said. ‘Because it’s a bigger system with more data on it, it takes a longer time to do.’ The program will remain mostly the same in its functionality, but there will be a few changes in its appearance and navigation, Finkle said. It will allow the university to stay current with the supported version of the software so that if there is a problem, they may contact the software company for help. The project to upgrade MySlice was started more than a year ago by a team including ITS, Registrar’s Office, Human Resources, Payroll, the Office of Admissions, the Office of Financial Aid and the Bursar’s Office.

One of the first things the team researched was a convenient date to upgrade the system.

‘We don’t call it the best time,’ said Maureen Breed, a university registrar. ‘We call it the least worst time because there’s always something going on, so there’s no perfect time to do something like this.’ This weekend was chosen as one in which traffic to MySlice should be minimal because class registration is over and professors are not yet inputting grades, Breed said. She said it should not overly inconvenience or disrupt university work.

Ashley Nelson-Hornstein, a junior information management and technology major, said she isn’t concerned with MySlice being inaccessible for the weekend.

‘I understand the need for server downtime,’ she said. ‘They notified us weeks in advance. At this point, I think the student population can do without MySlice for three days.’

rhkheel@syr.edu

Published on September 25, 2008 at 12:00 pm