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February 13, 2008
This Week With Astra
Let me be honest, it's been a tough week for Astra. Dale and I have spent too many hours trying to load events already scheduled in Scheduler Plus into Astra. The problem is that none of the data matches up (rooms, customer, customer types, and so on) are all different between the two systems. Astra can not recognize a regular Oracle date format for import, only a mmddyyyy format. Also, once the events are imported, they can not be modified, nor can they be canceled or deleted. So, although we have loaded over 400 events into Astra, they are only of value in that they will show which rooms have been scheduled - acting as placeholders. Also, Jill continues to run into errors as she is trying to configure Astra - that doesn't help, either. We have a meeting Friday morning to work on getting Astra configured better, so we can start actually using it for creating events. The database errors are frustrating in that they prevent Jill from adding necessary elements into Astra, such as customer types and equipment.
The library is patiently waiting in the wings while we work on the Astra configuration for the WUC. Once we can get Astra configured to allow for event creation, we should be able to bring the library on board pretty quickly. Let's hope we can make some headway on Friday.
It's not all doom and gloom, though. Don't forget that Astra now schedules every class on our campus, and does it really well. Also, if you care to look at Astra on the web, you will see why we are excited to have it working on our campus - room information is available to anyone who wants to look. You can request a room reservation right from the web, and you can see which rooms are available and which are already scheduled. Right now, we are experiencing some growth pains (and pain is the right word this week!), but we must not lose sight of the big picture. Some day we'll look back and say it was all worth it!
Posted by rossm at February 13, 2008 10:25 AM
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