A lot of work goes into planning a move to a new home. As students prepare to move into on-campus residence halls, it takes a team to make it happen well.
A year ago, the Department of Residence Life began planning a big move—not the living quarters for students, rather the location of an online application that helps it serve students.
Six years ago, Residence Life switched to a housing management tool called StarRez. Students use it to select their preferred on-campus housing options and find roommates. Staff use it to maintain hall rosters, facilitate resident communication, track occupancy, manage housing incidents, and much more.
Since its original implementation at Texas A&M University, the StarRez application was living on campus, hosted from an on-campus server managed by DoIT. Technology Services – Student Affairs hosts several vendor applications in this way. More recently the StarRez vendor announced they would be phasing out support for customer-hosted installations over the next few years. It encouraged customers to move to a vendor-managed cloud-hosted installation.
Although Residence Life was satisfied with the existing installation, the vendor offered incentives to move. Rather than deploy updates and new features annually, the vendor updates its cloud-based installations monthly. StarRez also offers a service called “Rez360” exclusively with its cloud version, which provides a broad view of a resident’s engagement. Also, if something goes wrong, there is a single point of contact responsible for ensuring quality of service. There would no longer be a risk of the vendor pointing fingers at the hosting provider.
“Because the vendor announced it was moving to a cloud-only solution, the real question for us was when to make the move,” said Michael Krenz, an associate director in Residence Life. StarRez is the leader in university housing management software, so having one of the largest on-campus living communities in the nation means there are not many acceptable alternatives for Texas A&M.
The move was completed this summer, in time to check in students moving on campus for the second summer school session. Already the benefits are being realized.
“The Rez360 view is a game changer,” said Christine Thoorsell, associate director in Residence Life. “The new view is very helpful because most of what we want to see on a daily basis is shown on one screen. It provides a holistic perspective of the resident that gives us what we need at a glance while letting us easily drill down if we need details.”
Arriving at a solution in which this value could be realized was no small task. The team planning and executing the move included 27 people representing Residence Life, DoIT, the vendor, and several other units on campus. They collaborated throughout the past year to ensure a dozen different sets of data would be securely transferred to and from the cloud location regularly.
Answering Michael’s question of “when” was a challenge. A move can be disruptive, especially for a service that is expected to be available 24/7. “We originally hoped to deploy last winter, but we quickly realized that was too optimistic,” Michael said. “We considered Spring Break, but that would not provide enough time after the transition to resolve any issues before returning to full use. The next window of opportunity was in June, which we achieved.”
The most challenging aspect of the move was dealing with an issue that emerged well into the process. Despite all the documentation and everyone asking questions early on, planning was well underway before realizing a particular data security concern. Texas A&M must follow stringent rules to protect student information, but the planned cloud configuration did not comply with these requirements for secure data transfer. “That stalled us for 45 to 60 days looking for a solution,” said Michael. “We were not confident we would make the June target until about Spring Break after working through this issue.”
What most helped to move the project forward successfully? Michael credits Jill Stickler in Technology Services – Student Affairs who served as the project manager. “Jill quickly understood our needs. She quickly understood how she could help us. She was excellent at shepherding us through the process. She set up good communication between all the business partners. She helped get answers from the right people.”
Jill knew from past projects that using email for communication on such a large project could be overwhelming for all the partners. Instead, she used channels in Microsoft Teams to organize all communication and to target messages to the right people for each topic.
Although the vendor has done many similar moves for other schools, it was open to considering ideas offered by Technology Services – Student Affairs staff who would ask, “I know you have been doing it this way for years, but have you considered doing it this other way?” One idea reduced the time required for a data import from several hours to just a few minutes twice a week.
In the end, after months of planning and testing, StarRez was offline for just four days in June as 260 gigabytes of existing housing data was moved from campus to the cloud. That data was imported and all systems and data feeds were given a final round of testing.
Like any home move, the final step was to issue a change of address notification. Links on web pages had to be updated to point to the new locations of everything that got moved.
Christine is not the only one who will enjoy the benefits of the move. “When we get our resident advisors and hall directors back for the fall, they will be excited by it,” she says. “It will be easier to teach our new staff. The Rez360 is going to be a significant change for them especially. They are always on call. Before they respond, they will be able to quickly look up information they previously had to click through several screens to get. Now one view shows what key a student has been issued, if they recently changed rooms, what concerns have been previously recorded, etc.”
Technology Services – Student Affairs and the rest of the team did a great job finding ways to make the big move successful. However, the team left one question unanswered. Where do you put the welcome mat for a new virtual home?
Finding value for our customers. That’s what we’re about. Ask how we can help you!
By David Swanson, Department of Information Technology, Texas A&M University Division of Student Affairs
Photo credit: David Swanson
