The ancient Greek poet Homer wrote about King Odysseus’ return to Ithaca. The modern Homer will help students return to bed faster after their 7 a.m. class registration.

Homer, the college’s new Student Information System, will go live for students to register for classes April 3. It took almost two years to put the system in place, costing the college $8.5 million dollars.

“There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s not an oncoming locomotive,” said Chris Knauer, registrar. “But we’ll see when registration goes through.”

Knauer said the system will replace the current SIS and Degree Navigator with a streamlined interface that will eliminate the problems encountered with Degree Navigator and the SIS.

Knauer said the college made the transition to Homer because the old system was outdated, because it had problems handling registration and because switching between SIS and Degree Navigator was too complicated.

This September, the college unveiled the administrative portion of Homer for the Office of Admissions to use, and for the Office of Financial Aid in November. It will be available to students after all data has been transferred, Knauer said.

Students will use the old system to access student account information until the end of the spring 2006 semester, when the system will be phased out.

Knauer said the Office of Admissions initially had problems with the system and had to customize it because the office and students needed functions the program didn’t include. Because the college is one of 800 schools currently using the system, Knauer said the college couldn’t make major changes to the product without affecting its ability to receive updates.

An anonymous administrator in the Office of Admissions said Homer had posed many challenges. The administrator said Homer initially couldn’t do a lot of functions the office needed, and people in the office still have to work through “daily challenges” with the system.

Ed Fuller, Director of Information Technology Services, said the college made sure the infrastructure was modern and easy to service and support so students wouldn’t have trouble.

“We expect [this year’s] registration will have much improved stability, reliability and performance,” he said.

On March 15, approximately 300 to 400 resident assistants and students working in offices on campus will get the first look at the new system. They will be given temporary passwords and will be asked to attempt registration to test the system’s traffic- and load- bearing capabilities, Knauer said.

“We’re interested to know if the system can handle three hundred people hitting it at one time,” he said.

Junior Monica Araujo said she hates the current Degree Navigator. “When I was a freshman, I woke up at 7 a.m. and tried to register,” she said. “But then [Degree Navigator] crashed and I ran out in the hall and everyone else was out there screaming. It crashed like a gazillion times, and no one knew what to do. No more stupid islands or useless numbers. We don’t need that.”

Students will find Homer attempts to solve many of the problems they might have had with Degree Navigator in the past, Knauer said.

The islands from Degree Navigator will be gone, and most of the interface is text-based. The system has a number of different search features, and students can e-mail professors from within the system with any questions they have. Knauer said registration takes only two clicks, and students can update their own directory information.

Knauer said the system probably won’t fix the biggest problem students have with the system: class availability.

“Students will knock on my door and say, ‘this Degree Navigator sucks,’ and it’s not Degree Navigator, it’s the course availability and the prerequisites you have,” he said.

The college purchased the product in June 2004 from SunGard SCT, a company offering administrative solutions. Knauer said the college will use the system for 15 to 20 years.

The registrar’s office will eventually eliminate paper overrides during registration, because they cause problems that even Homer can’t fix, Knauer said. Students will have to wait until after the registration period to get overrides.

“We need to get away from the paper process,” he said. “The paper overrides are defeating all of the controls we’ve set up. If someone gets into a class with an override, you might have all the prerequisites, and you go to register, and someone else has gotten it because they got a paper override.”

Freshman AJ Mizes said he wanted a reliable way to register for classes.

“Degree Navigator was frustrating — it would crash and freeze,” he said. “A few crashes are OK, but all the time isn’t.”