For the entirety of last year, there was but one word that conjured more malice on this campus than “Longhorn”– oZONE. No, not the hole-ridden layer in the sky, but the complicated new enrollment system, which students first met last September.

Replacing the popular enroll.ou.edu system, oZONE was a tough pill to swallow for most students.

“Change is what’s so hard,” says Brad Burnett, executive director of Financial Aid and oZONE project lead. “It’s different and functionality was lost, so it was hard.”

The Enroll system relied on a mainframe built more than 40 years ago and was in rapid need of a replacement. oZONE immediately had the advantage of being available to students 24 hours a day, but the adjustment was still painful for many students.

One key aspect lost was the ability to make trial schedules before enrolling – a function students can expect to be back in the fall. The university will be implementing a new system called Flexible Registration that will give users unlimited trial schedules, a better, simpler search and an interface that’s less overwhelming.

As it stands, oZONE is still the portal to all things OU. It’s the place where students can access enrollment information, bursar bills, grades and links to other university websites like Desire2Learn and Degree Navigator. Parents can also view financial aid information and add funds to a waning SoonerSense account.

Right now, each of the functions – libraries, money, academics, etc – are separated under their own tabs, but their individual functions can be difficult to navigate. Burnett says that too will pass when Phase II of oZONE is complete.

Begun in January of this year, Phase II will run through June of next year and will add features unable to be implemented in Phase I. The first difference students will notice is Flexible Registration, which will make the look and feel of the site more user-friendly, Burnett says.

“The feedback that we’ve gotten from students is keep it simple, keep it straightforward, make it look logical and nice,” Burnett says.