Please do look at the other PeopleSoft campuses (Long Beach, Sonoma, San Jose, Fresno, Northridge, there's a couple of others) and let me know which interface you like better. We've tracked the other CSU's pretty closely, and in some ways I think ours is better, but I'd be glad to hear other opinions.
Sonoma is using "raw PeopleSoft" without a front end, which generally does not get good reviews from students or other users. Actually, most of what you see once you get into BroncoDirect is straight PeopleSoft, and that's what BroncoDirect attempts to address for better or worse. Most of the complaints we are hearing, for example the cumbersomeness of viewing the class schedule, come directly from the PeopleSoft interface, not the BroncoDirect layer which is actually pretty thin.
We're working on making some changes, in particular with how the class schedule is displayed, that respond to the comments we've received. Hard to say exactly when they will role out, we know people are confused enough with a new system so we're trying to control the rate of change.
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Originally Posted by PandaMoOo That whole bronco direct interface is pretty bad. Although complex and pretty, it's often slow and is way too inefficent. What's odd is that is merely a front end to the bigger system all Cal States adopted, PeopleSoft. So it'd be interesting to see by comparing to other Cal State schools, how bad our I&IT department put the bronco direct system.
One interesting note I found appalling was; the class schedule is a fancy table structure. Not only does this make it hard to copy and paste 40 classes and put it all in one nice easy notepad for easy viewing, but the HTML code behind the table is absolutely huge.
100 Classes is about 500KB of data, for all you non techs out there, to load 100 classes it would take about 1 second to load each class on a dial up modem connection doing 5KB/sec.
Over 50% of the internet has High Speed Internet now, but I've looked at the HTML code and it's very redundant and nescessary. I'd say the code could easily be cut by a factor of 5 and still look the same.
Thats just one example of how BRONCODIRECT front end put together by our school is one culprit, but is the overall slowness/crashing PeopleSoft in the background? Is the Peoplesoft interface bad? Who knows... perhaps I will go inquire the IT department about it and see if there's any resolve anytime soon. |