Although this year’s class of freshmen has been studying at Ohio University for almost two quarters, their names and information had been strangely absent from OU’s online directory until Jan. 30.
That’s when the Office of Information Technology phased out OU’s eDirectory and brought the new people-search system online, one of the final steps in OU’s transition to the PeopleSoft student information system.
The eDirectory was part of Informs, the company that handled OU’s previous student-information system, which was retired when OU started using PeopleSoft.
“The goal is to get all of our students into the people search,” IT Communications Manager Sean O’Malley said. “Our people search needs to be talking to the most accurate source of data, and that is the new (student-information system) for students.”
The basic transition between Informs and PeopleSoft is complete, and OIT is now focusing on improving functionality, O’Malley said.
“The basics are up and running, but there are still things in each functional office that they'd like to improve,” he said. “There are things that we can have work better for them, or that have more features than what they have now.”
Frequent users of the people search may notice that several information fields, like address and year in school, have been removed from the results.
Some of these will be added back in as OIT further develops the people search, O’Malley said.
“Before we start providing more fields in individual search results, we need to make sure that the information is being pulled out of PeopleSoft accurately and meaningfully,” he said in an email.
In the future, users will be able to search by university department or by student organization. Additionally, OIT is exploring ways to include alumni in the search results, he said.
That added functionality provides students with professors’ offices or contact information, but the amount of use the website’s people search receives by students is questionable.
Spencer Smith, a junior studying English, said he had never used the search. Neither had Hannah Vaughn, a freshman studying anthropology.
Vaughn said she would be more interested in using the search if the functionality permitted searching by student organizations.
The work done getting the new people-search system up and running did not cost the university any money, other than the man-hours involved in setting it up, O’Malley said.
bv111010@ohiou.edu
