No queues of students ignorant of their timetables or even of their status as registered students, no lecturers waiting resignedly for their students to show up; problems resulting from bugs in the student registration system MUSL last year, have been resolved. The university's top IT manager, CIO René Kocken has confirmed this. “It works for students and lecturers. The system does what it should do: the basics. But this does not mean that everything is running as it should. We are not there yet.” One of the most complicated issues concerns the real-time link between the registration system and the pre-scheduling system. This was something the external agency that evaluated the new system's problems last year had warned us about. They recommended building in a delay, to work with a batch, but unlinking turned out to be rather complicated and labour-intensive as well, says Kocken. So the real-time link remained, even if there are still some teething troubles, he says.
At University College (UCM), which returned to their own proven systems last year because they could not get on with MUSL, the situation has greatly improved but is still not ideal, says international relations officer Ina Engelen. “We work with MUSL, but it has its limitations. Students who go to other universities or who go abroad to study, do not fit into the system well, and neither do alumni. We still use our own databases for those purposes.”