General

Harvard Data Warehouse (HDW) migration and outage, Sept. 20-24

As part of Harvard’s larger move to the Cloud, the Harvard Data Warehouse (HDW) will migrate from the data center at 60 Oxford St., Cambridge to Amazon Web Services (Cloud).

From 8 p.m. on Thursday, September 20th through Monday, September 24, as the migration is in process, the Harvard Data Warehouse will be unavailable.

As a result, certain Financial, Sponsored and/or Human Resource data in GMAS will be stale as of the end of the business day on Wednesday, September 19. GMAS will be brought up to date by 9am on Tuesday, September 25 when the HDW is back to normal...

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FSS Applications Website Moving to HUIT

The FSS applications website used by many people across the University will start redirecting people to a new applications page starting August 20th. Be sure to update your bookmarks for the applications page to huit.harvard.edu/apps/finance now!
 
Below is the formal communication from the Director of Administrative Systems, Enterprise Applications in HUIT. Please share this communication with those you...
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GMAS Release this Weekend

There will be a GMAS release this weekend. GMAS will be unavailable starting at 12AM, April 7th, and will be available again by 7AM, April 9th. This release focuses mainly on FIRST and Subrecipient Monitoring.

FIRST

This release includes the first wave of enhancements for improving and extending the automation for generating sponsored invoices and financial reports directly from GMAS, reducing the reliance on paper for the workflow of preparing and approving financial deliverables, and Improving visibility...

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GMAS Winter Recess Schedule

GMAS will be available during the winter break with the following exceptions:

Please have new account set up requests to your pre-award office according to the following schedules:

  • to OSP no later than 12 p.m. on Monday, December 18, 2017
    • proposals deadlines for OSP can be found here:...
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System to System (S2S) is Getting Retired - January 2018

You may have heard the news that S2S functionality in GMAS is going away. It’s true. As of January 25, 2018, GMAS will no longer support the system-to-system submission of proposals to Grants.gov. We wanted to provide a little background and information about the decision.

Background:​​​​​​​

  • GMAS has supported direct system-to-system (S2S) submissions to Grants.gov since 2007. 
  • The main goals of the original S2S project were to reduce duplicate entry and provide an easier entry and review interface (in 2007 Grants.gov used the PureEdge...
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September 25th Release Highlight - New Feature on the External Organizations Homepage

As part of the September release scheduled for the 25th, the homepage for External Organizations (non-Harvard organizations) is being converted. There is a new feature included with the External Organizations that allows users to see a list of all of the segments that an organization is associated to. For more information about this new feature, please check out the article, “...

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GMAS Release this Thursday

GMAS will be unavailable on Thursday, July 13th starting at 7pm for another stabilization release. The system should only be down for about an hour. The release will include additional fixes to bugs that were introduced as a result of the May 22nd release. 

  • Fixed bug which incorrectly generated approvals for OAR and COI when TBD Investigator is added to research team
  • Fixed additional bugs related to associating a TBD with an 'Investigator flag' to a proposal
  • Fixed bug which prevented people from being added to notifications list when...
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GMAS Release this Thursday

GMAS will be unavailable on Thursday, June 8th starting at 7pm for another stabilization release. The system should only be down for about an hour. The release will include additional fixes to bugs that were introduced with the May 22nd release. 

  • Fixed bug on the "Edit proposal information" screen that resulted in the COI approval disappearing.
  • Fixed bug which caused the inclusion enrollment form to map incorrect totals to the PDF preview on system to system proposals.
  • Fixed logic on person email addresses to be more flexible (...
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Let us know how we're doing!

GMAS May 2017 Release Communications Survey

Please take a moment to complete a brief survey about how we did communicating the latest GMAS release. Data from this survey will help us determine the best forms of communication for future releases. This link will also be available on the GMAS homepage, but feel free to share this survey link with those in your areas who may not log into GMAS often, or who do not subscribe to this blog.

Thank you for your anticipated participation...

fCOI and GMAS communication outage Friday evening through Monday morning

 

fCOI and GMAS will have a communication outage beginning Friday, 4/21 at 7pm through Monday, 4/24 at 8am.  This will result in GMAS not having up to date fCOI status information during that time.  Once the systems begin communicating again, the data will be updated (expected Monday morning 4/24).

Both systems will still be up and running during this time.

Please communicate this throughout your school/departments to end-users of GMAS as necessary.

 

Oracle Financial Systems Release Outage will result in outdated data on 4/24 and 4/25

Oracle Financials Systems will be having a Release Outage beginning on Friday, 4/21 at 6pm through Wednesday, 4/26 at 9am.

This will result in GMAS not having up to date financial information on Monday, 4/24 and Tuesday, 4/25 due to the unavailability of the Financials Data Warehouse.  We will have fresh data on Wednesday, 4/26 but it may be delayed because of final validation by Harvard Data Warehouse (HDW) staff.

We will continue to get updates from the HR Data Warehouse during this time period.

Please communicate this throughout your school/...

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Person of Interest Roles in GMAS

If you have ever tried to add a person to your research team or project in GMAS only to find they are not listed, the reason could be how they were set up in the Identity Management System (IDM/MIDAS).  The IDM system is used by HR to assign HUIDs and manage Harvard’s personnel identity data, such as job information and status, as well as start and end dates for positions. 


It can take up to three days for GMAS to receive new appointment records (a new person or a new position), however sometimes we find that even after 3 days we still do not see the person listed in...

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Guest Blogger Series - Alison Wellman Smith from HUIT: Q&A

Thank you so much for reading my blogs and for the interest these past weeks!  We have received some great questions as a result.  We thought we’d share the Q&A with everyone – hope this helps!  If you have other questions, please email the Help Desk at ITHelp@harvard.edu.  Your emails will go to the OBI project team.


Lets say you took a break from research admin for a bit and when you came back, CREW was gone and OBI is here.  What are the top reports you would tell a n00b to run?

The top grants dashboards I would...

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Guest Blogger Series - Alison Wellman Smith from HUIT: OBI and Sponsored Budgets

Given the wonderful new process to upload sponsored budget to the General Ledger in GMAS, I wanted to take a second to talk about how OBI works with the GL Sponsored Budgets.  GL Sponsored Budgets can be found in a few different OBI dashboards: Sponsored Accounts, Current Grants Financial, Historical Grants Financial, and Printable Grants Financial dashboards.

The Sponsored Accounts dashboard provides expense, income, and budget information at the subactivity, or 33-digit, level.  There are two budget-related columns in this dashboard: Current GL Sponsored Budget and Budget...

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