HR Direct

UMass Lowell is closed on Friday 3/8 for snow (although River Hawk Hockey game will be played as scheduled)

Employees are reminded to update their time sheet to reflect the University Closure.

Staff should see the following job aid:

• http://www.uml.edu/docs/ESS-Exception_Timesheet_Entry_for_University_Closure_tcm18-46482.pdf

Non-essential personnel should put in their regularly scheduled hours (standard is 7.5) using the University Closed (UCLSD) code. Non-essentail personnel do not earn comp time on a day UMass Lowell is official closed even if they work for a few hours from home or came into the office.

A job aid for police as essentail employees to report time is available in the "Information for Police" section and is also posted below:

• http://www.uml.edu/docs/ESS-Exception_Timesheet_Entry_for_University_Closure_Essential%20Personnel_tcm18-75900.pdf

W2 Year End Forms will be mailed to addresses on file within HR Direct as of 1/31/13.

W2's are also now available for employees in HR Direct under Self Service > Payroll and Compensation. 

Employees looking for additional information on their 2012 W2 can click onto the UMASS W2 Information link for a more detailed explanation on 2012 tax reporting.

2012 W-2 Information for Employees.doc

Due to an issue loading Personal Time in HR Direct, employees may notice that the Personal time on the January 18th pay advice reflects last year’s 2012 personal time award. 

A fix is being applied and employees will see the updated 2013 award on the 2/1 pay advice OR within a couple days on the HR Direct self-service employee timesheet.  An update to this message will be made once the correct information is posted in HR Direct. 

UPDATE 1/22/13 - Balances have been updated and are available on the HR Direct self-service timesheet.   Employees will also see corrected balances on the 2/1 pay advice.

Year-end tax documents (W-2's and 1042-S forms) will be mailed out in the next few weeks. It is important that your address in HR Direct is current to ensure you receive these documents in a timely manner.  Please log into HR Direct to verify and update, if needed, the address on file.  The path to review and update your address is:

Self Service > Personal Information > Home and Mailing Address

If you need assistance, please see the folllowing job aid:

• http://www.uml.edu/docs/M1_Maintaining_Home_and_Mailing_Addresses_tcm18-46469.pdf

Paycheck deductions for 1/4/2013

Employees who normally have Parking or GIC deductions (Basic Health, Long Term Disability, Optional Life Insurance) in their paycheck will see that those deductions are not present in their paycheck that is being distributed on 1/4/2013.  This pay date is the third pay date in a month and earnings are not subject to these deductions.

HR Direct Reminder for employees to REPORT TIME early for the current Pay Period:  12/16/2012- 12/29/2012

The University will be partially closed from Monday, December 24th – Tuesday, January 1st

In an effort to provide everyone with the opportunity to enjoy the holiday break and partial closing employees should report time by Thursday, December 20th.

With the exception of the two holidays (12/25/2012 and 1/1/2013) employees should report personal time (PER) or vacation time (VAC) for any time off during the break.

HR Direct Reminder for managers to APPROVE TIME early for the current Pay Period: 12/16/2012- 12/29/2012

The University will be partially closed from Monday December 24th – Tuesday, January 1st

In an effort to provide everyone with the opportunity to enjoy the holiday break and partial closing employees should report time by Thursday, December 20th.

If your employees report time by the close of this business day, managers should be able to approve time on Friday December 21st.

With the exception of the two holidays (12/25/2012 and 1/1/2013) employees should be reporting personal time (PER) or vacation time (VAC) for any time off during the break.

Employees are reminded to update their time reporting to reflect the University Closure on Monday, October 29th.

Staff should see the following job aid:

• http://www.uml.edu/docs/ESS-Exception_Timesheet_Entry_for_University_Closure_tcm18-46482.pdf

Non-essential personnel should put in their regularly scheduled hours (standard is 7.5) using the University Closed (UCLSD) code.   Non-essentail personnel do not earn comp time on a day UMass Lowell is official closed even if they work for a few hours from home or came into the office.

A new job aid for police as essentail employees to report time is now available in the "Information for Police" section and is also posted below:

• http://www.uml.edu/docs/ESS-Exception_Timesheet_Entry_for_University_Closure_Essential%20Personnel_tcm18-75900.pdf

NOTICE: Planned Maintenance Outage

During the morning of Saturday, September 22, 2012 a maintenance event will occur in the Production South Street Shrewsbury Data Center. This event will result in multiple services being offline as noted below. This is an expansion of a normal monthly maintenance window. It has been expanded due to the amount of work required and the estimated time to complete

WHAT: All services housed in the production South Street Data Center will be unavailable.

WHEN: Saturday, September 22, 2012 from 4:00 am until 12 noon.

WHY: Primarily UITS will be upgrading data storage software and introducing new equipment into the data center. These changes will provide enhanced performance and reliability for the applications in the data center.

IMPACT: From 4:00 am until noon on Saturday, September 22, all services in the Production South Street data center will be unavailable. This includes:

·         HR Direct and all PeopleSoft Production applications

·         Identity Management (IdM)

·         Summit and Cognos/RDS

·         Sharepoint (Workspaces)

·         Citrix

·         Other 3rd party and Departmental applications

·         Exchange email at UITS (not Lowell) – please note that no emails to President's Office staff (including UITS) will be sent or delivered during this time

Yesterday afternoon, at approximately 4:45 PM, the University Information Technology Services (UITS) data center experienced a software failure at the storage level of their infrastructure.  Unfortunately, although they designed their systems to be redundant and able to withstand this type of event, that wasn’t the case in this situation.  Although roughly half of the (redundant)  servers were not directly impacted, users could still not access many of our applications.  UITS escalated to the vendor immediately and their technical team was fully engaged to resolve the situation.  Systems were starting to come up around 9:00 PM, that process continued for 1-2 hours.  UITS and our Lowell campus resources will review this event thoroughly and will incorporate changes to systems and operations as appropriate.

All IT groups sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and disruption this event caused.

If you have suggestions on how Lowell can better manage these outages, please email our Administrative Systems Integration team at asi@uml.edu