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Colleague Application Support Team

Colleague Application Support Team

The College has utilized Ellucian Colleague as a Student, Financial, and Human Resource Information System since 1999. The College enjoys a mature implementation of the software including admissions, registration, academic records, degree audit, financial aid, student planning, curriculum, student billing, student disabilities, student EOPS, CalWorks, Community Education, Adult Education for non-credit, human resources, mandated reporting, e-Commerce, webadvisor, and self-service. Many in-house software reports, subsystems, integrations, and changes to the as delivered Colleague source code have been developed. To obtain optimal use of our student and administrative systems, maintain satisfactory user satisfaction while meeting District goals, and protecting the college investment in Colleague the district has maintained the Colleague Application Support Team (CAST). The Colleague Application Support Team(CAST) provides mission critical support for the Colleague integrated enterprise system. Effective integration and coordination is important to continuing health of system operations. CAST meets regularly, comprised of module leaders and support personnel from across the district. Module leaders serve as the resident experts for subsystem functionality, departmental training, subsystem setup parameters, troubleshooting, and reporting.

CAST is comprised of Information Technology staff members along with the module leaders responsible for the applicable functional areas in software that are used or owned by a department across the district. These individuals must work closely with all areas to ensure all Colleague modules meet the needs of the college. Certain department module leaders have designated support staff serving as functional “experts” in the software and business processes for their areas. CAST module leaders and designated support staff are expected do the following:

  • Be the most knowledgeable person in the institution regarding module functionality
  • Know when and how to perform setup changes for academic or fiscal year boundaries
  • Act as the key holder to data and mnemonic security
  • Coordinate testing for patches and releases
  • Act as first-line of support for departmental functionality including troubleshooting, training and ad-hoc reporting
  • Maintain department documentation and procedure manuals
  • Serve as the MIS liaison for data residing in their area of responsibility
  • Liaison with IT for interfacing applications, customizations, and production problems
  • Coordinate with other module leads on upgrades and systems testing, and
  • Represent the institution by participating in user groups, allowing the college to realize the full benefit of these partnerships.