Departmental Applications Support Policy
A "Department Application" is defined as software that is required specifically to support a department’s objectives. It maybe a complete “off-the-shelf”, “shrink-wrapped” application or a custom written application. Often it will involve programs, templates and reports that are written for generic applications such as Visual Basic, Word, Excel, Crystal Reports, Q&A to support the specific needs of a department. It is not the standard application such as Access but it is the program written to run on Access.
The requesting department’s responsibilities include:
- Verifying that the application meets their needs
- Purchasing the selected application software, the associated software maintenance contracts, and any hardware that may be required
- Inventorying and holding all documentation, licenses and media
- Providing one or more points of contact that will be responsible for application. Duties include:
- serving as a liaison with the vendor, maintaining application and a written log of significant events
- maintaining the inventory of all documentation, licenses and media for the application
- maintaining the disaster recovery plan for the application.
- Maintaining proof of software license for any executable modules and/or data residing on servers, regardless of location and type. Location is defined as "where the software/data reside on the server", and type describes type of services required (e.g. running off the server on the desktop or running on the server as a service).
- In the case where backup/restore applies to a specific application, the department performs backup/restore if the application has its own backup/archiving management system. OIT Enterprise Operations and Systems will in general perform backups and restores of all user data residing on OIT housed file servers.
- Maintaining a disaster recovery plan for the application and for presenting the procedure to the Departmental Applications team for review
- Problem diagnosis or bug fixes (The Department Applications team will assist in the effort as needed)
Vendors will be responsible for training department/customer day-to-day desktop operations of the application, for example:
- Creating database user accounts
- Accessing needed application/data
- User modifiable reports
- Backup/archiving
The Department Applications Support team is the point of contact for Department Applications purchased from 3rd Party Vendors. The Team:
- will assist in the analysis, selection, evaluation, testing and installation of department application software
- can be called upon to help the department and vendors design a disaster recovery plan
- will not provide any CODE maintenance for applications