I receive a half dozen desperate calls every spring and then again in the fall from IT departments of universities and colleges all over North America having just endured a painful registration week where Banner has either crashed or experienced a major slowdown due to high user traffic. Usually, an institution’s leadership reacts to a deluge of parent calls following their child’s less than ideal registration experience. These IT departments tell me these failed registrations are often followed by equally painful conversations with the institution’s president’s office asking what they are doing to prevent such problems in the future.
I am seeing a large number of Ellucian customers upgrading to Banner XE. This is because Banner XE features an updated user interface, improved accessibility, true modularity, and enhanced flexibility and navigation which can deliver considerable savings to your school. These improvements are the result of a new architecture, completely different from previous Banner versions. If you recently upgraded to Banner XE or are planning to do so, performance testing for peak loads around events like registration are a must if you want to assure a smooth outcome.
Ellucian Partner
RadView is a certified partner of Ellucian dating back to 1999. Two different groups at Ellucian use WebLOAD. The Professional Services division utilizes WebLOAD to deliver highly effective load testing and tuning services to their customers in the field. Ellucian’s own QA team relies on WebLOAD on a daily basis to verify that Ellucian software solutions are ready to meet your performance needs.
Load Testing
Enterprise-grade load testing is within reach for higher education. With WebLOAD you record a single user interaction with Banner XE via their browser. This recording then becomes your baseline load test script. Next, you quickly manipulate your test script to produce the anticipated peak production load mix you expect on Banner XE. Once you have successfully tested your new Banner XE environment, you can use WebLOAD Analytics to compare results between test runs, perform “what-if” load scenarios, identify performance bottlenecks, confirm tuning effectiveness and finally, validate that Banner XE is ready for your next peak traffic event, like student registration.
The only way to be sure your registration will be a smooth one after upgrading to Banner XE is to carry out a load test prior to registration. Otherwise, it’s a roll of the dice. RadView Software has worked with many Ellucian customers and higher education institutions just like yours to ensure that registration goes off without a hitch.
Take It From These WebLOAD Pro’s!
“It is easy to learn and set up load sessions. Reports are easy to configure and represent data in a nice visual way.”
Liza Tikhova, Sr. Quality Assurance Analyst at The University of British Columbia
“The RadView staff hung in with us to insure we were finally able to run a successful testing of the entire registration process.”
Kelley Baran, Director of Administrative Systems, Bridgewater State University
“This technology allowed my team to effortlessly run regression analysis on several experiments at once and study users’ transactions over time, while the users were accessing the portal. It also allows us to test and compare the performance of our Ellucian Banner and Research Portal web site by varying the number of users authenticated to the portal, and display the dashboard portlets page, and measure response times.”
Dr. James Logan is QA Manager at Georgia Tech
We would love to help you to make the most out of Banner XE. What are you waiting for?!