Teachers and academic advisers are preparing for the five-day PeopleSoft outage that will limit users’ access to MyASU accounts. The outage, meant to upgrade the entire system, begins Thursday morning and will last until Tuesday.
PeopleSoft is the software used to manage MyASU accounts. Students will be unable to make changes to their personal information during the outage.
Employees will not be able to report work, vacation or sick hours.
Students will continue to have access to job applications, but cannot add or drop a class or request transcripts. The temporary outage will still allow users to access online classes, receive paychecks, print DARS reports and access student Sun Cards. The outage will not impact Blackboard, ASU online or Gmail.
Oracle Corporation, which runs PeopleSoft, has recently upgraded its software. The renovation will keep the two programs in sync, said University Technology Office training group manager Paul Stoll, who runs communications for the project.
“PeopleSoft is a very large, complicated software that is central to ASU’s success,” Stoll said. “Because of this, we make sure that the best people are running that software.”
The upgrade will keep software maintenance costs low for ASU, he said.
“If ASU stayed in our current, older, combined version of the software, Oracle would charge ASU more and more to continue to support the software,” said Stoll.
Another feature of the upgraded system is the “split environment.” Instead of signing into the main page to use PeopleSoft, staff and faculty will be directed to two different websites — one for managing student data and the other for employee information.
The “split environments” transfer files to each website, allowing for little error regarding data entry, Stoll said.
Managers of PeopleSoft decided to perform the upgrade this week because payroll, grading and enrollment are not heavily utilized and the upgrade will be completed before fall break begins, according to the PeopleSoft website.
ASU spokeswoman Julie Newberg said the ASU community has been planning for the outage for more than a year.
“Forums, meetings and feedback sessions have been held for several months,” Newberg said.
Scot Schoenborn, associate director of Academic Services for the School of Life Sciences, said virtually all departments on campus use PeopleSoft for different purposes.
During the outage, Schoenborn said, faculty will continue performing their daily jobs utilizing other programs such as Microsoft Word and Excel.
“It’s pretty much business as usual,” Schoenborn said. “Once PeopleSoft is back up, we will edit and update records of all the students we met with during the outage.”
Reach the reporter at mkthomp5@asu.edu
