Student records (SITS:Vision)

The University's student records application is the Tribal SITS product (comprising SITS:Vision and its web functionality SITS:eVision). It is used in the management of admissions, students, examinations, courses and student finances. The SITS application is managed by the SITS Application Management Team in the Academic Office. The Student Administration Application Management Service manage the underpinning service and specific activities as described below.

Application specific service activities:

Developments within the application toolset, where authorised by the Academic Registrar's Office
Admissions cleardown
A level results data load
Baccalaureate results data load
Daily import, export and scans to UCAS
Bulk data updates and loads, where approved by the Academic Registrar's Office
Data archiving
Fortnightly admissions statistics
Monthly International Office statistics
Adhoc queries/extracts
Extract for Academic Statistics
Extract for Raisers’ Edge, Students Union etc
Interfaces with other systems
Maintenance (including application upgrades and software updates)

Service Level Agreement

See standard SLA (link)

Application specific availability information

Required availability period: All year; 24/7

Critical availability periods: Enrolment (Aug/October); Academic Statistics(Last week of October); Examination scheduling (September/December/May/June); Degree congregation (January/July); marks and awards processing (January/ May/September); fee processing and collection (August-October/November/ February/May).

Currently, in order to ensure the application is fully functional and secure, there are

two application upgrades per year (usually applied as a double upgrade and expected to require a 2 period of unavailability)
quarterly operating system and database security patching (expected to require up to 1 day of unavailability for each)
database upgrades as necessary
application software supplier patches (containing either enhancements or bug fixes) applied as required, with the agreement of customer representatives. (Patches are issued on a weekly or multi-weekly basis and are normally non-disruptive.)

A regular system restart will be scheduled on a daily basis to ensure that any dynamic software changes are committed. This will necessitate the application being unavailable for less than 5 minutes.

Application specific performance information

Process used for measurement of response time: logon and retrieval of menu system.

Between 6:00pm and 07:00am the application and data operate at reduced performance due to the running of scheduled data maintenance and extracts.

The level of service provided excludes ......

Training
User management

Dependencies

This service has dependencies upon the following 3rd parties:-

Tribal (software supplier)
Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS)
Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA)
Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE)
Student Loan Company (SLC)
UK Borders Agency (UKVI)