BUSIPlus Bloggy Blog

Sure, you may not think it’s significant, but it’s the first, *very* minor step in the BUSIPlus redesign. To help promote the site this year, we’ve unveiled an updated logo, the beginning of a project whose goal is to unify our image and to create a front-end design worthy of the back-end infrastructure. We’ve been working on the design for a number of months now, trying to maintain an elegant look for the site while retaining its minimalist design roots. What do you think of it?

Having some issues with the blog, and lost a post regarding future changes.  To summarize, we’ll be doing some backend work over the next month to get things running smoothly for Fall registration.  Will post further updates by the end of the week…

Do you guys have any suggestions for what new features you’d like to see?  We’ll be doing some interface updates in the next few weeks as well.

Though things have been somewhat inactive these last few months, we’re still working to slowly upgrade some things with BUSIPlus. We have some smaller projects we’re going to take care of at this time, which will help us speed up administration of the site. Some of the things we have in mind are:

• Upgraded Email System: We will be making modifications to the way we send out announcements in order to decrease the load on our email servers and get you messages faster. This is now necessary as we can no longer post messages to the B-Line. As part of this effort, we will also provide the ability for users to opt out of email notifications. In order to do this, please make sure to add busiplus@gmail.com to your address book so the messages don’t get marked as spam.
• Banner Schedule Updates: One of the remaining items left from our upgrade this spring is to setup an efficient course updater. This will hopefully allow us to increase the frequency at which we update enrollments.
• User System Upgrade: As the number of BUSIPlus users has grown steadily, the organizational structures we created are getting a bit clunky. We will revamp this so we can support expected growth throughout the years. As part of this, we will begin collecting graduation dates from users so we can clean out old accounts. Improving this part of BUSIPlus will also allow us to perform efficient data backups.
• Login Page Overhaul: One of our goals for the coming months is to upgrade the BUSIPlus site with a new interface with a sleek look that still keeps page load times down. The first phase in this will be to update the login page with an improved layout. In addition, we will provide information for first-time users about BUSIPlus.

Is there anything we’ve missed that you’d like to see? Let us know. We will try to perform these tasks as soon as we can, and aim to perform much of the work over the summer to minimize disruptions. Hopefully, by taking care of the above, BUSIPlus will have the first part of a much-needed upgrade in order to ensure its viability in the coming years.

Well, they’re a few weeks late, but lo and behold, the Fall 2008 schedules are now available on BUSIPlus! We’ve ironed out every bug we could find, but we can’t be absolutely sure, so please make sure you let us know if you find anything that doesn’t work.

Please bear in mind the following issues that we are working to resolve:

• Enrollment updates may be slower than usual. This is because Banner’s query system is much slower than the old BUSI pages. We’re working on a good way to update our database without having the script timeout.
• Grade options are not available. For some reason, this information is currently unavailable from Banner’s public view. We will be in contact with the Computer Center to see what our options are. Is this something you guys even used?
• CRN numbers don’t show up anywhere. We will be adding these in slowly to help you register. For the time being, please use the section numbers to find the courses you’d like to sign up for.

Other than the notes above, we’re fairly confident that everything works just like it used to, so you can use the same familiar interface on BUSIPlus! We have also added in the Summer ’08 schedule (think of it as a present from us to you). Our apologies that this wasn’t ready in time for early registrations, but we hope that BUSIPlus will continue to be useful to you in the upcoming semesters. If there’s something in Banner that we don’t have and you’d like to see, please let us know. We will do our best to add it into our database.

Sorry for the delays guys, but with Matt and I having work and grad school after graduation, it’s been tough to get things rolling with BUSIPlus. We will get things up by the end of the week (if not sooner). We just need time to make sure that the new changes don’t break our system, so we don’t want to rush them – last thing we want to do is to give you guys crap. I’m hoping to have time these next couple of days, so expect some good news soon.