Tuesday, August 2, 2016

New Name, New Digs, and a New Website

The last several months have been full of changes for the group formerly known as Student Accounts.  Finance recently completed a significant reorganization exercise, part of which included changing the name of the Student Accounts group to Student Financial Services.

On June 3^rd, the Student Financial Services group moved to join their Finance colleagues over in East Campus 5 on the 4^th Floor.  The move finally brings the entire Finance department under one roof.

The end of June also brought the launch of the new responsive website for Finance, with significant updates to the student-focused portions of the site.  Topical menus on the landing page and a more strategic approach to organizing and cross-referencing the pages are intended to make information easier to find.

HigherEdPoints.com

The University of Waterloo is pleased to announce it has joined the HigherEdPoints.com program as a Participating Institution. With this new partnership, students, their family, and even friends are able to convert Aeroplan® Miles and/or TD Points into funds to help pay their tuition.

For more information and to set up an account, please visit the HigherEdPoints website.

GlobalPay for Students

To make an international tuition payment, use our GlobalPay for Students service.  The service is convenient, cheaper than a traditional wire transfer, and posts quickly to the student account.  Students can make payment in their local currency at a competitive exchange rate.

Mobile Promissory Note Submission

The Quest Mobile team is continuing to add new functionality and the latest addition is live in time for Fall term:  Promissory Notes can now be submitted using the Quest Mobile app on your mobile device.

IST freezes WCMS feature requests to clear backlog

"Our development team has been very busy working on requested features/functionality and the new responsive templates," says a memo from IST circulated earlier this week. "However, our current backlog of requests and scheduled projects exceeds our capacity, and some difficult decisions in how we will handle this backlog and move forward with new requests had to be made."

In recognition of this situation, IST has announced that all feature requests/tickets in the WCMS development queue will be reviewed. Those that are older than one year, do not align with the remaining 2016 development priorities, or are not considered “business critical” will be resolved.

"Moving forward, we ask that all new feature requests be held until otherwise notified," says the note from IST.

IST began reviewing existing tickets on Thursday, July 28.

There are other development options:

"If there are features that you would like to develop, external developers (non-WCMS staff) can work on projects that may be integrated with the central build or deployed to specific sites. You might consider funding a contract position or hiring a co-op student, for example. Please contact Andrew McAlorum, amcalorum@uwaterloo.ca, to discuss." 

Bug reports should continue to be filed as normal (i.e. submitted via RT to ist-wcms-dev@rt.uwaterloo.ca).

Business critical requests will be escalated and evaluated against current WCMS priorities and capacity and can be submitted by completing the Business Critical WCMS feature request form.

Development priorities for 2016:

• Performance optimization for WCMS sites;
• Completing work for responsive sites (including generic template), Publications, Conferences, and Single Page sites;
• Integration of Shopify and e-commerce;
• Developing the responsive Faculty and Researcher sites using OpenScholar;
• Implementing Brand Refinement project design changes

Development priorities for 2017:

• Migration of WCMS sites to Drupal 8

"Thank you for your patience and understanding," IST's memo concludes.