Informer Training and Support Policy (5.2-1)

Tags Informer

Purpose

To assure SVSU has an appropriate structure in place to provide continued support for users of Entrinsik’s Informer product, the University has adopted the support structure below.

Policy / Procedure

  • Each department utilizing Informer has at least one staff member (non-student), (hence referred to as Informer specialist), that after being trained is responsible for first line support for Informer issues in their department.  ITS Enterprise Applications will assist with any issues that specialists cannot resolve on their own.
  • Informer specialist(s) must be identified as part of the initial implementation of Informer for a department.
  • ITS will coordinate initial training for the Informer specialist(s). 
  • Informer specialists are also responsible for:
    • training and re-training additional and new staff members in their department
    • identifying which staff in their department need access to which files and fields
      • Note – Access to files under the jurisdiction of other departments, as identified by ITS Enterprise Applications, require approval from that department. 
    • identifying role based security rights for staff in their department, i.e. who is allowed to create, delete and run reports 
      • Note – When assigning the modify and delete privileges, be aware that report definitions (the syntax & formatting used to create a report) and archived reports (the actual report results) cannot be restored if modified or deleted.  These are stored in the Informer database on the Informer Server.  Restricting the delete privilege to as few as possible staff is recommended.
    • determining the need for recurring running of reports and using Informer to schedule these processes​​​​​​​
      • Note- Since Colleague requires downtime for system maintenance and backups, Informer will also be unavailable during those times. Reports scheduled to run during a downtime or not completed by the start of a downtime, will not complete.Therefore, reports should be scheduled to run only during the following times: Monday through Saturday 4:00 am–10:00 pm, Sunday 9:00 am - 10:00 pm . Also, as feasible, running reports during non-normal working hours (before or after 8am-5pm M-F) is strongly recommended to reduce the load on the Colleague server during peak usage times.
  • Access to additional files and fields not identified during initial implementation, can be requested using the Enterprise Applications Access Request service on mysupport.svsu.edu.  ITS Enterprise Applications will review these requests with ITS Programming, as necessary. 
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