Looking Back, Looking Ahead: How Working on a Team Helped Us Each to Grow

This is a conversation with Connie F. Cooke, Director, Financial Aid, State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo State and Sharon F. Cramer, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, Emerita, SUNY Buffalo State. They started working together twenty years ago when they began to implement a new student information system for the university. The SABRE Project (Student Admissions, Billing, Registration and Enrollment Management) was in place from August 1999 through December 2004, with a full-time team of ten, several part-time staff from IT and Institutional Research, as well as Oracle consultants. Buffalo State was the first campus to go live with the online OSS Registration System, in April 2004. Within the year, they also included faculty permission, waitlist, reserved seating, and online grading (including "last date of attendance" aid reporting). Some of the OSS functionality was more robust than the Banner student system, which replaced the OSS. Banner was implemented during 2007-08. Banner has become the most prevalent product used in SUNY, now at 53 out of the 64 campuses. In this conversation, they discuss how they were able to create their team.