October 2014 Maintenance Release
Features
Make Short Title field uppercase
The Short Title field for FA or PAC inherits the original value from its parent eGC1 which typically is a mixed case entry. A change has been made to always store and display this field in uppercase in SERA independent of the eGC1. This will help speed up data entry as GCA staff can directly copy and paste the data in FIN, and the budget name will already be in uppercase as required by FIN.
Include new FA and PAC data elements in extract
About 30 additional FA/PAC fields have been identified by GCA and added to the data extract (through “Export Pending Actions” from the “Search” tab in SERA). The new fields are added to the end of the file, and the GCA flag is listed as 9 separate yes/no columns on the report. The addition of these fields will help speed up the budget setup process as GCA staff won’t need to look for the information elsewhere.
Make FA “Total Cost Share Amount” Field format Numeric
The “Total Cost Share Amount” field on an FA (previously alphanumerical format) has been cleaned up and all historic non-numeric data has been purged (approved by OSP). The field has been reformatted to accept numeric values only. It is allowed to be empty when the Cost Share flag is “no”, and a numeric value or zero is required when Cost Share is “yes” per business rules. This change will help with cost share amount calculation and match that to Cost Share Summary in eFECS. As a result of this change, the reporting field “totalCostShareAmount” in the Award table in the EDW 1.0 database RAD has also been updated to numeric.
Update auto-generated ADV emails and add to Admin tools
The auto-generated campus notification emails (for FA, PAC and ADV) have been edited by GCA and updated in SERA. The content of these emails is now stored in the admin database and can now be managed through the SAGE admin tool. A new admin UI “SAGE/SERA” (similar to SAGE/SPAERC) is yet to be developed so GCA staff can access this admin tool and manage the content of these emails. This task will be included in a future release (to be prioritized and scheduled).