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Information Technology Services
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The Environment

The Enterprise Systems department manages and maintains a variety of computer systems to support administrative activities at the University of North Florida. The main enterprise-wide system is a packaged solution named Banner. Banner is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from SunGard Higher Education which provides the University with a suite of administrative applications to support the areas of student records, financial aid, finance, and human resources.

In addition, the department manages a number of integrated partner systems including a Web portal (CampusM), an academic learning system (Canvas), imaging and document management, and a data warehouse and reporting solution. Integration of dozens of smaller, special purpose applications is also the department's responsibility.

The Banner system uses an Oracle database and is hosted on a UNIX server. The system is largely written in Oracle's PL/SQL language although some processing and reporting programs are written in COBOL and Pro C. UNIX shell programs and Java are also used - primarily for utility and integration functions.

Online functionality is provided via two methods. Internet Native Banner (INB) provides data entry and retrieval functions for the core Banner product and is the main platform used by operational units within the University to maintain and process data. INB services are developed using Oracle forms.

Banner Self-Service (BSS) is a Web-based solution for larger audiences such as students and other casual users of the system. BSS is an html-based solution and is written largely using PL/SQL.

Physical hosting of the Banner is provided by the Central Florida Regional Data Center (CFR) located at the University of South Florida in Tampa. CFR provides us with database and application servers, manages the operating systems for those servers, and system DBA management for the Oracle databases.