InfoBear issues not resolved.

No one knows better then BSC students that online registration for courses can be extremely stressful. InfoBear has not always been reliable, whether it is difficulty logging in, an unexpected log out, slowly loading or just not loading at all. Registration is usually a late night and early morning for most students; resident or commuter. On registration nights, there are anywhere from 1000 -1500 students attempting to register for class at the same time. InfoBear is designed to handle a much larger amount than that throughout the course of a day, but when so many students are trying to log on at the same time, the speed of InfoBear is affected considerably.

InfoBear is maintained and controlled by the Administrative Systems Department of Information Technology. They are responsible for fixing any problems that result in the hardware infrastructure that allows InfoBear to function correctly.

Thomas Groh, the Associate Vice President of Information Technology compared the process to Christmas shopping. "Ninety percent of the time you get in and out of the local mall with no problem. However, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, stores, parking lots, and roadways are overcrowded. So you have a somewhat slower and more frustrating experience. Thankfully for us, we only experience this resource strain a few days a year," he said.

Information technology is currently working on ways to improve the functionality of InfoBear. Every Friday night when InfoBear is unavailable for use, it is receiving routine maintenance, upgrading the system, and installing new patches.

The upgrades are newer programs being added to the InfoBear programming, and the patches are software solutions to improve flaws in the software.

"Currently we are evaluating some new infrastructure solutions that should provide increased availability, said Groh." The solutions would eliminate single points of failure by employing redundancy, thus reducing the chances that any set of simultaneous failures would cause a loss of service."

This would basically be a second InfoBear server that works as a backup to the first InfoBear server if the main InfoBear server was to fail. This hopefully will allow a more secure connection to InfoBear with more stability and less hassle for students.

While, the college is attempting to improve the performance of InfoBear many students still dislike the process. "It's a terrible system, I absolutely hate it," said sophomore student, Kate MacLachlan. "The last registration night I was up until three in the morning, and I still hadn't registered. I would rather wait in line all day at the Registrar's office than deal with three hours of InfoBear and have nothing to show for it but a headache," said MacLachlan.