Taken 6 weeks for the media to gingerly mention Y2K again! ;^)

Course thanks to Homer and a few other folks these problems have been reported here all along, and ignored, while the Off-Topic threads get lotsa responses and the trolls scream Off Topic :-)

Quirky humanimal nature ...

[ Fair Use: For Educational / Research Purposes Only ]

Feb 14, 2000 - 04:19 PM

Universities Face Headaches After Installing PeopleSoft Software

By Nicole Ziegler Dizon, Associated Press Writer

EVANSTON, Ill. (AP) - When students at Northwestern University wanted to register for winter classes last November, it was supposed to be as easy as point and click.

The university spent millions of dollars installing new software by PeopleSoft so, among other things, students could register online. But as hundreds of students tried to sign up from their rooms, point and click turned into crash and burn.

"When more than a handful of students tried to register simultaneously, the portal just shut down," said Rebecca Dixon, who as associate provost of Northwestern enrollment had to set up an emergency registration process at the school's computer labs.

Northwestern is one of several universities that installed PeopleSoft programs to replace outdated, non-Y2K-compliant computer systems, only to find serious glitches. Problems have delayed tuition bills and financial aid - and registration.

Officials at PeopleSoft, one of the world's top business management software-makers, say the problems were to be expected, especially as large universities scrambled to prepare their systems for the year 2000.

Laura King, PeopleSoft's director of marketing for education and government, said it's extremely complicated to transfer old university systems - fragmented from department to department - into new ones that share records from, for example, the financial aid office and the registration office. King also said data entry errors hindered the software's ability to work at some schools.

Northwestern decided to go with PeopleSoft in 1996, a year before the Pleasanton, Calif.-based company released its student administration software. Since the university was one of the first to test that software, it was natural to have kinks to work out, King said. More than 420 universities use the software.

"It is a young product," King said. "There's lots of nuances to this type of software and this type of technology."

In addition to Northwestern, other schools that have experienced problems include:

-Cleveland State University, which hired a law firm to sort out problems that delayed financial aid for thousands of students and sent costs of installing the programs soaring from an original estimate of $4.2 million to $11 million.

-Boise State University in Idaho, where transcripts were delayed and costs had ballooned to $16 million - almost three times the original estimate - by the end of last year.

-The University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, where trouble with PeopleSoft software created a loophole for students with poor grades who otherwise would have been asked to leave school for the spring semester.

Northwestern plans to try online registration again this week for the spring quarter. Dixon said students successfully added and dropped classes online last month, so she's hoping registration will work as well.

"It'll be time before you can say that we've got smooth sailing," Dixon said, adding with a laugh, "I hope in my lifetime, and I'm only 60."
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Hey! But it's only oh 2 or 3 hours to FOF !!!

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), February 14, 2000

Answers

Ha! The ever-vigilant spotted and posted this article at the same time :-) This place is the fastest Glitch-Report in the West!

Our thanks, a zillion thanks again to all the remediator heroes who slaved away at their spaghetti code and saved the world from the Disruptions That Could Have Been.

God life is good now! Keep the miracle holding, let the good times keep rolling!

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), February 14, 2000.

A&L, You bet they will succeed. Companies/institutians that waited until the end of the year to install Y2K solutions were foolish, but on the whole one can address many computer problems at a time and still come out on top. I work for a 20B company who uses PeopleSoft. We converted our segment(2B) last summer without a belch, or even a burp at rollover. Sorry, I hope you're not overly disappointed that the world isn't coming to an end.

-- Mimi (Mimi@abyssinia.com), February 14, 2000.

Mimi, sorry you have such gulfing reading comprehension difficulties.
It truly is amazing that enough got remediated!

Please take your expertise over to these Universities and help them out; surely they'll pay you a hefty consulting fee to relieve them of their troubles quickly.

People like you are what lets us know a good portion of the good fortune is amazing grace!

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), February 14, 2000.

Ashton and Leska,

Thanks for the post! Yes, "Y2K" is being mentioned lately...big surprise to me. =)

Mimi must not realize that this forum has evolved, or morphed as Diane says. It's not TEOTWAWKI anymore--it's TEOTFAWKI (The End Of The Forum As We Know It). LOL

-- Dee (T1Colt556@aol.com), February 14, 2000.

Um, Mimi:

Cleve State has been trying to turn on PeopleSoft for something like 18 MONTHS now, so it wasn't "Shoved in at the last minute".

My bride's company uses the purchasing portion of PeopleSoft and is in the process of dumping it for a number of reasons, not the least of which is it won't handle a B/O situation AT ALL.

Chuck

-- Chuck, a night driver (rienzoo@en.com), February 15, 2000.