The University News

Issue date: 10/30/06 Section: News

Waning are the days of "Legacy," the computer system students currently use to enroll in classes. In its place will be a system purchased by the University of Missouri System in 1998 entitled "Peoplesoft."

The biggest change for students is a shift from the current dark-screen, archaic interface through which they navigate, to a more accessible one.

"It will function a lot like MySpace or eBay," said Doug Swink, associate registrar.

On the advantages of Peoplesoft, Swink noted the 24-hour access as opposed to the current restricted hour of operation.

Also, the system will be entirely Web-based, meaning students will no longer have to download STAR to add, drop or enroll in classes off campus.

Although the implementation is still underway on both the UMKC and University of Missouri-Columbia (UMC) campuses, the University of Missouri-Rolla (UMR) campus has been fully operational for some time. The University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) is one year behind UMKC.

"The program is very robust in terms of its data tables and functional service abilities," said Jay Goff, dean of Enrollment Management at UMR. "We are happy with the student and faculty self-service programs. Our 2005 student survey indicated that about 90 percent of our students preferred Peoplesoft over the old mainframe programs."

Goff did note that a couple of problems occurred in 2004 with Peoplesoft - problems that took a few months to fix.

"Based on our experiences, we have prepared a series of 'lessons learned' and best practice reports for UMKC, UMC and UMSL campuses," he said, "Hopefully our experiences will help make the Peoplesoft implementations go even smoother at UMKC."

As the pilot campus, it took UMR about six years to become fully functional with the new software. The project began in 2000 and the last module, financial aid, was implemented in September 2006.

The timeline on this campus is much shorter.

Implementation kicked off Jan. 18, 2006, and the computer system should be fully functional Aug. 13, 2007. Students can expect to enroll for the summer 2007 and fall 2007 semesters using Peoplesoft.

There are four stages to the process of fully converting to the new interface.

Admittance and Finance was the first module to go online, and three other modules will be fired up incrementally: student records, financial aid, and cashiers.

When asked if she liked working with the new software, Director of Cashiers Karen Wilkerson said, "Oh yes. Especially from the student and staff side it's great."

Wilkerson did mention she has run across a few stumbling blocks during the process of getting to know the new "intuitive" system. She said these setbacks are understandable and easily tackled.

Training will be provided for both students and staff to adapt to the new software.

Swink said there are plans to offer classroom training. He also said there are plans to have tutorials and streaming videos available to aid students with becoming acclimated to the online interface.

"Training is probably the biggest piece of this project," Swink said.

dmathis@unews.com

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