South Carolina State University
About the Client
Since 1896, South Carolina State University (SCSU) has maintained a legacy of excellence in education. We have been home to generations of scholars and leaders in business, military service, government, athletics, education, medicine, science, engineering technology and more. Located in Orangeburg, S.C., SC State was founded as a land grant college with a mission of providing education and service to the citizens of the state. In its first century, SC State was a leader in education and continues to lead the way into the next century.
Challenge
SCSU was seeking a consulting partner that will work with its Information Technology Services (ITS) team to implement new application servers and upgrade the databases for their Banner® upgrade.
ITS was committed to an infrastructure with multiple lifecycles of Development, Test & Production, hence, SCSU were looking for guidance and best practice from the partner on the following:
- Appropriate number of virtual servers in each environment
- Role of each server in each environment
- Adherence to security best practices for each server
- Least permission
- Least number of roles required on each server
- Appropriate design for scale out and/or scale up of servers
- Design for High Availability between data centers on the SCSU Campus
- Appropriate number of code deployment servers
- Suggestions to scale for additional users at peak operating times of the Academic calendar
Banner® CASification
Solution
Post rigorous evaluation and reference checks, SCSU selected OculusIT, that came along as an IT, ERP and Cloud Service provider, with proven experience upgrading their clients Banner® environment, managed and provide professional services.
Per this ongoing engagement, SCSU receive professional consulting services including:
- Discovery & Design
- Technical Deployment for Banner® XE/9 Application Environment.
- Banner® XE Functional Discovery Analysis & Roadmap
- Banner® XE Technical Environment Readiness Assessment
- Banner® XE Cloud Architecture support on Microsoft® Azure
- Banner® XE/9 baseline installation:
- APP Navigator
- ESM
- XE Admin
- XE Student Profile
- Banner® CASification including:
- Create and prepare the wallet with SCSU’s student portal CAS certificate
- Prepare the SQL files for Banner® CASification
- Testing the readiness of the systems for CASification
- Install CAS Client on Banner® Database
- Patching the twbkwbis with custom modes
- Setup web tailor parameters configuring portal global sign out
- Annual Maintenance includes:
- Support for upkeep of Banner® SSB Single Sign-On (SSO) from SCSU portal for production instances.
- The banner upgrades affecting twbkwbis package may break CASification.
- Dedicated support during all planned upgrades. Any unplanned services outage is supported through the regular support process.
- Also covers all 24×7 P1 support arising out of the production Single Sign-On (SSO) not working.
Major Success
- Cost optimization by eliminating costly upgrades
- Banner® management and administration is smooth
- Streamlined our IT processes