With an elevation of 7,700 feet, Western State College of Colorado is at the highest altitude of any four-year college in the United States, but the fourth oldest public college in Colorado is using the Blackboard Transaction System™ to reach new heights.

Western began using the Blackboard Transaction System™ – Unix Edition in 1998. But a comprehensive deployment that includes vending, dining, activity, laundry and copy machines led to a decision to migrate to the Blackboard Transaction System – Universal Edition.in late 2006. The decision was made with several specific goals in mind including the need to move from dated serial infrastructure to IP, support both Microsoft® Windows® and Oracle® environments, achieve a lower total cost of ownership, purge sensitive cardholder data and improve system support and usability.

One challenge for Western was to support an existing campus card infrastructure that still relied primarily on serial connections between reader hardware and the transaction server, as well as dated print servers. To complicate matters, the college’s HP Unix server was due to be replaced, a disruptive event requiring a significant expense.

Properly supporting the system became another difficult challenge for Western’s Information Technology department, which relied primarily on a single team member—the only person who had the necessary previous experience to maintain the campus card network. Now that the college has moved to Universal Edition software and uses the existing IP infrastructure on campus, the entire IT staff is able to support the system.

Expanding Operations

Western traditionally has been a heavy user of Microsoft Windows, so when it came time to migrate from its existing UNIX platform, the college was more than comfortable making the move.

The Western State College staff members also greatly appreciated being able to use the Oracle database required by Universal Edition because they already had a campus-wide license. Given their familiarity with the software, the Oracle database made Universal Edition an even better fit.

Western used its migration to purge sensitive cardholder data that still existed in its Unix Edition. When it came time to migrate the data, administrators only transferred specific and relevant cardholder information to the new Oracle database. They were able to leave behind data such as Social Security numbers, birth dates and mailing addresses. “We didn’t need all that information in the new system,” says Janna Hansen, assistant director of campus life. “We have that information in other systems on campus. It doesn’t need to be in the card system, too.”

Because Western does not have a traditional card office and maintains a small support staff, the college benefits from the improved self-service capabilities which are an important byproduct of the migration from Unix Edition to Universal Edition. In Unix, they used one Value Transfer Station; but, since the migration, they have been able to expand their operations to include three Payment Headquarters in Location (PHIL) stations, and have begun accepting credit card deposits via PHIL, which is a great convenience to parents who now can deposit funds easily when they visit campus.

Moving Forward

Western currently uses a third-party door access system in one campus facility, but plans to migrate their entire access control over to their Blackboard® system, which the Universal Edition platform makes more cost-effective—given its 8-to-1 ratio between doors and Master Controllers (the ratio in Unix is 1-to-1). Starting with approximately 15 doors on Universal Edition access control, Western will add nearly 30 more doors in the short term, and is exploring the possibility of expanding its deployment to include 150 external doors.

“We like the security module in Universal Edition,” says says Aaron MacLennan, assistant director of enterprise information systems at Western.. “We wanted to eventually consolidate everything in one system and Blackboard provided us the capability to do that. Western’s business department, facilities and security now all have the ability to control the doors in their respective facilities.”

“Overall, the software in the Universal Edition is simply more intuitive than in the Unix Edition,” MacLennan continues. “We’ve had greater success while using the Universal Edition, in terms of the ability of other departments to use the software. Dining Services, for instance, now runs their own reports, while other departments are able to control access to their own facilities.”