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February 20, 2008
Astra Weekly Upgrade
This week in the Astra world was a bit frustrating - until today. Jill's problems I reported about last week culminated in a "bug" report, and required a programming fix from Astra. The bug occurred when attempting to modify how a customer type was charged (full price, half price, waived) for various components. Astra would accept the changes, but when you went back none of them were saved. Yesterday, Astra support called me and they had the bug fix done, then we applied the fix to our application. Today it appears to be working correctly.
Since the bug bottleneck is behind us, Jill has been able to complete some more setup and now has the customer types set up with their correct charging information. Her work looks very good. Next, we have some report modifications to make so that such things as event confirmation forms and routine reports have the necessary information in them. This should not slow us down, though, this is just one of the next steps we need to take.
The class schedulers are rapidly becoming savvy, experienced Astra users. They have begun working on Fall 2008 term, but had some difficulties with "rolling over" the Banner data. The rollover worked, but required a lot of tweaking to make individual items correct. We will be loading the Fall 2008 Banner term data into Astra pretty soon.
As you know, I was very impressed with Astra during the implementation phase. It is a complex application with many different components that must all work together. The implementation was as painless as any I've been involved with - by far. Their halo has slipped a bit, though, with two "bugs" we discovered as we work through our setup phase. The first problem was a programming error that prevented us from putting our practice term into production. The second was Jill's bug, which is really amazing to me that this slipped by so long with Astra in production - surely someone else must have had this problem??? Anyway, the support people and the implementation people at Astra are really great to work with. Problems are bound to come up, and it is a real plus to know there is a "real person" you can contact for help, and that person will actually provide assistance.
Posted by rossm at February 20, 2008 8:57 AM
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