Registration 'nightmare' at UMass

For 25,000 students and faculty on the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts, last week's start of the new term was even more hectic than usual, thanks to a computer malfunction that prevented many students from signing up for classes.

''It was a logistical nightmare," said associate professor of classics Debbie Felton.

The university uses software from PeopleSoft Inc. to manage student registration. During the summer, campus computer administrators installed the latest version of the software but apparently something went wrong.

''They ran into some difficulties," said university spokesman Ed Blaguszewski. ''They didn't get as far as they would have liked."

The school's Web-based class registration system began to break down as 18,000 undergraduates, 6,000 graduate students, and 1,000 faculty returned to the campus after the Labor Day holiday.

''The system initially crashed, and over the past week service has been intermittent," said Blaguszewski.

As a result, many students couldn't register, while many of those who'd already signed up couldn't use the system to find the locations of their classes.

''Somebody somewhere started a rumor that classes were canceled last Wednesday," said Felton. The rumor was false, but Felton said many instructors were confronted with half-empty classrooms.

Frustration continued throughout the week. Although the system was generally online, it was slow and unreliable, apparently because it couldn't handle the workload.

''We kept getting sent e-mails saying it's going to be fixed any minute now," Felton said. But by week's end, the problems were unresolved. So computer administrators came up with a stopgap solution. They locked out faculty access to the system on Friday, to give students a chance to get signed up. Over the weekend, the students were barred from the system and the faculty was given a turn.

As of yesterday, the registration system was running more reliably, though it still wasn't back to normal. University computer administrators were consulting with PeopleSoft, of Pleasanton, Calif., in an effort to iron out the problems.

''They've been working around the clock literally on trying to solve this," Blaguszewski said.

The entire UMass system uses PeopleSoft software to manage its human resources and finance systems, as well as student registration on all five campuses. But David Gray, chief information officer for the university, said the Amherst campus uses a custom modified version of the software, and that similar problems have not happened on the other campuses.

PeopleSoft spokesman Steve Swasey said UMass has been a customer since 1998, and that 730 institutions of higher education worldwide use his firm's software. He blamed the problems at the Amherst campus on difficulties in setting up the software on the school's systems, not a flaw in the software itself. ''We're working with them now to understand what it is," Swasey said.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.