Total revision of the collection of decrees of the University of St. Gallen

The cantonal university statutes [sGS 217.15; US] in the Canton of St. Gallen were completely revised on January 1, 2025.

This posed a particular challenge for the University of St. Gallen. All decrees, directives, regulations, study regulations, etc. also had to be completely revised editorially on the same date. Not only did they have to be given a new regulation number, but all references to the previous statute also had to be changed. The titles, abbreviations and new responsibilities also had to be adapted.

Thanks to the Excel-based import and export function of DocGenie® for initializing the decree system, this task was quite easy to master:

The task for the University of St. Gallen was to first export an inventory Excel. This lists all existing decrees in table form.

Each metadata has a individual row in this table. For example, the column “Übersicht Nummerierung” lists the serial number of each decree. Or “Erlasstitel DE” the German title of a decree and “Erlasstitel EN” the English equivalent. All references in the ingress of a decree can also be exported to a column “LexVerweis DE”.

In order to include the metadata that will change as a result of the total revision, additional columns have been added to the Inventory Excel - for example ‘Übersicht Nummerierung NEU’, ‘Erlasstitel EN NEU’, ‘LexVerweis EN NEU’, etc.

The University of St.Gallen has now entered the newly applicable metadata in these columns. This was the actual “homework” that had to be done manually.

After completing the extended inventory Excel, this was imported into the system again.

In a matter of seconds, the new decrees were created from their respective predecessors combined with the new metadata.
The previous decrees remain available in the system. On the one hand, this is ensured by a link in the metadata of the respective decrees. On the other hand, a new navigation entry has been created which can be used to call up the entire previous collection of decrees.

This meant that the upcoming total revision of all decrees could be prepared in peace and quiet and also be run through and checked completely in the acceptance environment at normal times. Thanks to the timeline function, the actual go-live could be carried out before 31 December 2024, which meant that the future decrees were already available for a day or two as future decrees. The new university world then went live automatically at midnight.

Michael Niedermann, University of St.Gallen:
“Overall, we are very satisfied that we were able to realize this project together in such a short time. The implementation went smoothly!"

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