BUSIPlus Bloggy Blog

It’s been a quiet few months for BUSIPlus.  But don’t worry – we’re still working on it.  Just very slowly…  Anyhow, you can now view Summer and Fall 2009 schedules on BUSIPlus!  Visit BUSIPlus to search classes and build your new schedule today!  Please let us know if you find any problems with the new schedules.

Don’t forget: if you like BUSIPlus, please add yourself as a fan on Facebook and let your friends know!  Visit the BUSIPlus Facebook page.

On an unrelated note, though there’s been a lot of controversy, isn’t it still incredible that Binghamton finally made it to the Big Dance?  Go Bearcats!

Ever since BU made the push to Banner, we’ve found ourselves not really adding new features to BUSIPlus, but rather fixing all the features that broke.  One of these was the old Copy Schedule from BUSI feature, where you could log into BUSI, copy your schedule there, paste it into BUSIPlus, and have one of our schedules made for you instantly.  (For the curious, this was actually the very first tool built for BUSIPlus, all the way back in April 2005.)

We’ve finally fixed the backend of this to be compatible with the new BU Brain output.  We have tested this on a variety of inputs, and you can paste a bunch of things into the importer:

• Just type in the CRNs, separating them with either spaces or line returns
• Copy the Student Detail Schedule (either normal view or printer-friendly view)
• Copy the Week at a Glance text

Let us know what you think.  Oh, and don’t worry – we know we still have a bunch of places where CRNs need to be integrated (the schedule viewer being the most notable).  We’re working on getting this in place in the near future, so sit tight!  If you have other ideas for CRN integration, make sure to let us know.

For anyone looking for them, Winter 2009 schedules are now available, along with an updated version of the Spring 2009 schedules.  Now that a couple of quirks with the updater have been handled, we should be able to run it more often.

We’ve added some minor enhancements to the BUSIPlus schedule builder.  First off is the new course descriptions we’re linking to, which now include actual summaries.  Now, we are also linking each CRN to its own description, as the BU system shows different descriptions for each section.  Also in the section view, if you hover over the room number, a tooltip will help you decode the abbreviation.  There are a few minor tweaks that have been made to the way things are displayed, most notably that the grid is now turned on by default for schedules.

Please keep providing us with suggestions, and we will continue to make incremental updates as quickly as we can.

We’ve identified and fixed the bug, and all the missing courses seem to be in the BUSIPlus system now.  Sorry for any trouble this may have caused.  The bug seems to have been limited at this point to courses offered by the Biology department (including Biochemistry).  Please let us know if you find anything missing, though we believe this fix should have covered them all.

We’ve just been informed (thanks, Chris) that there are a couple of classes missing from our database.  Specifically, the ones identified are BIOL 224, BIOL 331, BIOL 351, and BIOL 376, though there could be more missing.  We will be working on this ASAP to resolve the issue.  In the meantime, if you see any other classes missing from BUSIPlus, please let us know as soon as you can.  We will post an update when we fix the problem.  Sorry for any inconvenience in the meantime.