The SAP production system and the myOleMiss portal will be unavailable beginning at 5 p.m. on Thursday, April 2, due to a major upgrade. The system is scheduled to be unavailable until Tuesday, April 7, at 8 a.m. During this downtime, Office of Information Technology (IT) staff members will upgrade these systems to the required software levels for the SAP HANA database migration that will take place in December 2015.
Importance of This Upgrade
This upgrade is a pre-requisite for the for the SAP HANA database migration. In order to migrate to this cutting edge, in-memory database, these systems must be upgraded to the software levels specified by SAP. IT generally performs these upgrades to production systems during holiday breaks to minimize the impact to the UM community.
Some challenges that have led IT to SAP HANA include long run times for jobs, “data rich, but information poor” reports, the need for real time analytics, etc. Because we live in a culture of immediacy, we are looking forward to SAP HANA enabling us to vastly improve data access times and establish a reporting strategy to carry us through the next decade. In addition to the database being 100% in-memory and using a column store format instead of the traditional row store that is currently used by today’s popular relational databases, the SAP HANA database will offer several features that UM can exploit to greatly improve the overall performance of our applications. These features include being able to consume data in a variety of ways, provide better support for mobile apps/geospatial data, and produce predictive models.
What does this mean for the UM Community?
While the upgrade is taking place over the Easter holiday weekend, the UM community will not have access to the myOleMiss portal as well as the SAP production system. All applications within myOleMiss such as the online catalog, online student payments, admissions applications, online registration for classes, and others will be unavailable during this time. Additionally, SAP GUI users will not be able to access the SAP production system during this time. All departments are strongly encouraged to plan ahead for this outage.
SAP DEV and QAS Systems to be Upgraded in March
To prepare for this upgrade, there will also be downtime for other systems like SAP DEV, SAP QAS (the SAP Quality Assurance/Testing System), and the myOleMiss developmental portal. This will allow for the UM community to test their processes before the production systems are upgraded. On March 2-9, 2015, the IT technical staff will upgrade the SAP development system (DEV) and the myOleMiss development portal. On March 16-23, the SAP QAS system will be upgraded.
During the upgrade period, completion of change requests from the UM Community for SAP processes and any myOleMiss applications will be delayed until the scheduled upgrades have been completed. Some examples of these include adding new branches of study for HR, adding regions for procurement, adjusting the monthly account statement message, as well as any requests for new development. These types of requests must be first configured/completed in the DEV system and then released to the QAS system for review and final approval. Then, upon approval by the functional office, the change is scheduled for import into the PRD system. Because these changes must traverse our entire SAP landscape, any change that was started after March 2, 2015 cannot be imported to the PRD system until the upgrade has been completed.
Contact Us?
If you should have questions or require assistance, please contact the IT Helpdesk at 662-915-5222 or via email at helpdesk@olemiss.edu. Thank you for your patience as we perform this important work. IT staff will be working diligently to re-open the systems as soon as possible.
Office of Information Technology
it@olemiss.edu