In Focus on Services-Banner Environments
Ellucian Banner serves as the core Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system at EKU for managing comprehensive data related to courses, students, employees, and alumni. Similar to standard software development practices, Banner undergoes distinct stages of development ensuring the thorough testing of new features before their implementation as updates, patches, or upgrades.
Banner, along with other business applications such as Argos and BDMS, operates within three distinct environments:
1.Test Environment
- Purpose: Conducting trials of new features and configurations before promotion to the production environment.
- Characteristics: Instances in this environment are solely dedicated to testing, allowing users to evaluate new application configurations and customizations.
- Frequency: Cloned from Production approximately four times per year or when requested from Production.
2. Development (Pre-Prod) Environment
- Purpose: To verify the readiness of recently implemented features in the production environment, testing is conducted using data that is a week old. This ensures a thorough evaluation of the setup's completeness before the features are officially deployed for production use.
- Characteristics: No upgrades applied to this environment, same version as Production across all areas.
- Frequency: Cloned weekly from Production to provide a fresh dataset for testing and experimentation without impacting the production environment.
3. Production Environment
- Definition: The live database instance representing the "official" version of Banner and Business Applications, accessed by all on-campus offices.
- Role: Houses the actual database instance used for day-to-day operations and data access.
- Importance: The primary environment for offices on campus; the live version of the ERP system.
By adhering to this structured environment setup, Ellucian Banner ensures a systematic and secure approach to the development, testing, and deployment of new features and updates for maintaining the integrity and reliability of the ERP system across EKU's operations.
