PeopleSoft representatives see it differently. Jim McGlothlin, now a vice president with Oracle who also worked for PeopleSoft, says that onsite consultants for the vendor did help UMass out. McGlothlin says universities sometimes experience problems with the software because of their tight deadlines and inadequate load testing of the new system. "You need to allow a couple of weeks to do proper load testing," he says.

After four long days and nights, Dubach and his staff were able to corner most of the problems. Students and faculty were allowed back onto the system without restriction the following Monday. A few periods of slowness raised the anxiety levels during the weeks after, but the system never went down again. Dubach reports that student registration in November for spring '05 classes went smoothly.

Dubach took away some valuable lessons. First off, he says he was naive about the amount of testing and fine-tuning such a new and intensive system demanded. In the future, Dubach says, he will try to coordinate hardware upgrades with application upgrades. When he buys new hardware, he will install the software upgrades on the new hardware, test it and have it working perfectly before he replaces the old systems with the new ones.

While Dubach says he is going to stick it out with PeopleSoft, in large part because UMass has already purchased the software licenses, some university CIOs say there is an easier way.

Middleware to the Rescue
From the looks of it, Northeastern's student self-service portal, called MyNEU, has all the features of a modern-day Web portal, like Stanford's Axess and UMass's Spire. Each student's personalized site has links enabling him to check his courses, grades, finals schedule and, if he has a campus job, his latest payroll information.

But who would ever believe that lurking behind it all is a 25-year-old Cobol mainframe, chugging along. "It works like a champ," says Weir. The interface keeps the student body happy and permits Weir to keep that mainframe in service while he works on other forward-facing applications.

Weir and his staff are able to integrate the front ends and back ends by using using middleware—in this case, IBM's WebSphere product among others. So while HTML and Java code allow students to use the add-drop class function on their MyNEU page, WebSphere is doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes, interactively "typing" the Web information into the mainframe. In this way, Northeastern's IT can utilize Web interfaces to keep the front end looking pretty without having to rip out the back end with every upgrade. "The beauty of the Web is that you can mask all of that to the customer," Weir adds.