Yesterday’s CoursEnroll proceeded with no issues, according to David Yeh, vice president for student and academic services. The program allowed more than 2,000 seniors to submit their course requests for the Spring 2009 semester within the first half hour of the enrollment period, he said.

The apparent success of CoursEnroll came as a sigh of relief to students who had experienced bugs and glitches in the program when it was launched in April. The program’s subsequent failure to allow students to add and drop courses earlier this semester caused further distress.

CoursEnroll went back up yesterday afternoon to the applause of those who were unable to enroll in classes on Monday. But while the commotion may have only been temporary, PeopleSoft — the recently installed replacement for Just the Facts — has a long and storied history of what many claim to be sub par software.

In Jan. 2004, Ohio’s attorney general, Jim Petro, filed a lawsuit against PeopleSoft, seeking $510 million in damages. Petro charged the company with fraud, breach of contract and negligent misrepresentation among other counts, stemming from a faulty installation of the software at Cleveland State University.

When Jason Cohen ’09 logged into the new PeopleSoft replacement for Just The Facts at 6:30 yesterday morning to sign up for his fall semester classes, he expected CoursEnroll to be a breeze. What he found, however, was a stress-inducing procedure full of bugs and glitches that didn’t allow him to finalize his schedule until 1:30 in the afternoon.

With the University’s newly implemented and more technologically advanced system in place, Cohen, along with most juniors and seniors, had hopes of a quick and easy process.

Bear Access, which has served the University for more than 10 years, will soon become a part of Cornell’s history.

After Spring Break, Bear Access will be completely replaced by PeopleSoft, a web-based administrative system that is used in more than a thousand schools. The current Just the Facts will not be available between March 11 and March 23. Starting March 23, students will access their personal, academic, bursar and financial aid information via PeopleSoft. This new system will also facilitate future pre-enrollment from April onwards.

“[With Bear Access,] the most common complaint is that you can’t use it on a Macintosh,” said Griffin Wilson ’10, who works at the Cornell Information Technologies help desk.

The word “CoursEnroll” brings a groan from most Cornell students, often coupled with unpleasant memories of waking up at 6 a.m. to sit bleary-eyed by their computers. For many, CoursEnroll means several minutes of waiting with crossed fingers to see if they get into classes and often trying to rearrange schedules on the spot.

To help and deal with some of the problems students have found with CoursEnroll, a new system will be implemented for the Fall 2008 pre-enrollment .

The system, PeopleSoft, will have features such as course specific wait lists and “swap,” which would allow a student to drop an old class and add a new one simultaneously.

“Any person… any study.”

The plethora of classes Cornell offers may hold true to Ezra Cornell’s founding vision, but enrolling in those classes is sometimes easier said than done. Even if students are able to pre-register for a class during CoursEnroll, they are not guaranteed enrollment.

According to David Yeh, vice president of student and academic services, “CoursEnroll as it is now is not one’s schedule. It is one’s preferences and requests.”

This may come as a surprise to students.