On May 1, 2018, use of the CRM Advise system expanded to include all AU advisors. CRM Advise is a customer relationship management application built on the Microsoft Dynamics platform. This application facilitates student retention and success by allowing advisors to focus on at-risk students based on success profiles, performance and academic indicators, and risk-detection alerts. Interactions with students are captured within the system, thereby allowing a collaborative and holistic way of understanding student development.

Additionally, AU adopted a unified framework for all freshman communications. On May 1st, AU began using CRM Advise to streamline the communications, after a campus-wide teaam evaluated the need for each message and simplified the content.

After the 2017 launch of ServiceNow by OIT, AU has started leveraging ServiceNow and a service framework for student facing services across campus. The technology has been applied to student services provided by AU Central, Student Accounts, Financial Aid and Office of the Registrar. All student facing services from these four offices are available within a new JustAsk portal, which went live on May 21st.

JustAsk has a Google-like search interface that allows students to search for their information needs and request assistance for specific issues. The four departments created hundreds of knowledge base articles and fillable forms to simplify day-to-day actions, reduce unnecessary “high-touch” interactions, reduce unnecessary back and forth via multiple emails, and increase student satisfaction. 

On June 4, 2018, the content management system, which runs AU's public website (www.american.edu), was upgraded from CommonSpot 9.05 to CommonSpot 10.5. With this upgrade, the backend infrastructure was also upgraded to the latest versions.

On June 6, 2018, AU's Office of Enrollment began using the enterprise student recruitment tool, CRM Recruit, for managing and tracking prospective student activities.

Ellucian's Colleague, AU's enterprise resource planning system, houses the institution’s student information, financials, human resources, payroll, admissions, and financial aid data. 

The system runs on a non-relational Unidata database; however, AU is in the process of migrating the database backbone to SQL Server over a period of two years.

This is one of the largest and most complex projects ever undertaken by OIT.