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Many among the University of Maine’s faculty are disgruntled with PeopleSoft, but the UMaine System (UMS) refutes those concerns, saying the program’s failings are minor, user-caused or the result of misinformation.
From the student perspective, PeopleSoft’s implementation and use has gone well, according to Cindy J. Mitchell, director of Administrative Systems Development and Support for UMS. UMaine’s Faculty Senate expressed a different perspective during its meeting last week.
“PeopleSoft is, by and large, a piece of garbage,” said Roy Turner, associate professor of computer science, during the meeting.
Mitchell, however, refuted Turner’s claim.
“They have not worked with us on this implementation and many of our staff have degrees from the university of Maine. They don’t have anything to sound that comment on,” Mitchell said.
The problem with PeopleSoft lies mainly in navigation, Mitchell said. She said UMS received complaints from UMaine faculty about the difficulty of finding things within the program.
“We have a couple of quick-fix solutions [for the navigation problem] that are being implemented before registration period in October,” Mitchell said.
Also among the faculty’s concerns last week was the worry that UMaine students will, in the near future, be forced to use the domain maine.edu as their sole e-mail account in place of FirstClass. Faculty Senate called it PeopleSoft e-mail, but Mitchell said there is no such e-mail in the program.
“In our prior system, when a person became accepted, they were given an e-mail account for the University of Maine System. Every student gets a Maine e-mail account, so that is not new. Quite a while back, UMaine acquired FirstClass. The University of Maine is the only one that chose another path for the e-mail [FirstClass], all the rest of the students in the system are using the Maine ID [john.joe@maine.edu]. So, this implementation [PeopleSoft] has not given people another e-mail address; it does not say people at UMaine do not have to use FirstClass anymore,” Mitchell said.
The University of Maine System Network (UNET) Web site stated new students and employees are assigned inactive accounts when they first register or are hired. Students must activate their accounts to use them. UNET provides computer services, administrative systems, networking and course delivery infrastructures for UMS campuses.
“PeopleSoft has the ability to send e-mail, and that is where the confusion comes in. At a technical level, we are looking at what we can do to make that transparent for those of you who have two e-mail accounts,” Mitchell said.
UMaine’s faculty also expressed concern regarding the Internet Technology workers UNET sends to work with UMaine. Members of the senate said that they were not very useful when asking them to fix problems in PeopleSoft. Mitchell said that UMaine’s faculty has no grounds to criticize UNET.
“I know how hard our staff works here and how complex this is,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell said part of the problem is a misconception held by some that PeopleSoft is brand new.
“It’s a product that’s been out there for a very long time. There also seems to be an impression that we are just [now] building this thing, or that we are just able to change pieces of it wholesale. It is more like we bought a car . when we get the car we find oh gosh, we didn’t get a tow-bar, or we didn’t get a rack,” Mitchell said.
UNET declined to comment.
UMaine’s Financial Aid Department will integrate into PeopleSoft around the third week of January 2009, according to Peggy Crawford, the department’s director. After an 18-month learning curve involving the allocation of financial aid, Crawford expects the department to have a handle on the ins and outs of the program.
PeopleSoft went online July 6, 2003. Student options for registration, finance and records management were added during Spring 2007, Financial Aid is next in line.
“We are going to award aid for fall ’09, spring ’10 and summer ’10. At the same time, we’re still awarding spring aid for spring ’09 and summer ’09, so for us it is an 18-month calendar. Until we can go through the entire cycle that’s how it’s going to be. So yeah, it’s going to be a real learning curve,” Crawford said.
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