Ousting OWLnet

During the last four years, Temple’s administrative systems have undergone a major and long overdue upgrade and continue to do so.

The archaic system that hosted OWLnet, among other administrative sites, was slow, unable to handle a lot of student capacity and unable to interact with other university communications systems.

The objective of Project Enterprise is to replace the aging student, financial and human resources legacy systems, with Banner, a vendor-supported system also known as an Enterprise Resource Planning system.

The switch to Banner will allow the various administrative departments to communicate more efficiently and effectively with each other and students, develop new applications and provide new services to students that the previous system would not have been able to provide.

However, the upgrade, as Valerie Rubinsky explores in “OWLnet times out” on Page 1, goes beyond the relief students will be feeling during registration week. Isis, a Temple-developed system, isolated various administrative functions and the technology could not support even a fraction of students enrolled at the university.

The new technology will improve in-house services, allowing branches, such as Human Resources, Student Financial Services and Admissions to work faster and better communicate problems or concerns with students. It will also allow students to see their academic history during class registration.

Finance and human resources are among the branches that have already undergone the change – the most noticeable change for students still to come.

The technology behind the previous systems was 25 years old and self-developed by Temple.  OWLnet itself was 11 years old.

Having an unreliable system does not make the process of selecting courses for expected semesters easy for underclassmen. An advanced system, that will allow smoother processes such as registering for courses or paying and viewing bills and financial aid will be beneficial.