The “I Hate oZONE” facebook group has received a large response from students, but, out of the 1,928 members of the group, only three students attended the “I Hate oZONE” forum Wednesday in Dale Hall.

The forum had 174 confirmed guests on Facebook.

There have been five forums about oZONE and out of the five sessions, 25 people have attended, said Nicholas Key, spokesman for the oZONE project.

“A majority of those were advisers, not students,” Key said.

At Wednesday’s forum, eight members of the oZONE project team attended the forum to answer questions.

“oZONE gives us the ability to go much farther than [enroll.ou.edu] ever could, it’s just gonna take a while to get there,” Key said to a question from one of the three audience members Wednesday night.

The new system offers availability 24 hours a day as opposed to enroll.ou.edu, Key said. Enroll.ou.edu had reached its peak and would never have been able to reach this ability.

There have been a lot of questions about the timing of oZONE’s implementation, Shari Black said in response to another question. Black is another member of the oZONE team.

“We went live when we did so students on campus would be here on campus to use it,” Black said. “In this way, we could teach them how to use it and it was done in a time when students could come in to mitigate their problems.”

Black said this system has 56 servers running oZONE and IT has set it up with battery backups and generators included to ensure a reliable system.

OU registrar Matt Hamilton said they have scheduled the departments to go live with oZONE at the opportune times.

“The implementation has gone well and the performance of the system has been nice,” Hamilton said. “Although there wasn’t the look and feel like we had before [with enroll.ou.edu].”

There has been a question about implementing this system before it was ready, said Rick Skeel, another member of the oZONE project.

“It is ready and there are lots of schools that use it,” Skeel said. “The problem is that our students come from a system that was better.”

Skeel said OU and SunGard, the company providing the software for oZONE, have paid close attention to the questions and concerns on the Facebook group, “I Hate oZONE,” and have been taking note of that in their system changes.

Hamilton said this is not an easy situation and each university using a SunGard system has to choose how to do this.

“We appreciate the feedback and the candid conversations that have occurred on oZONE because we really feel this feedback will help us,” Hamilton said.

The members of the panel all said that the system is not where they want it to be, but said it will get there eventually.

Caitlin Lawson, English senior, created the Facebook group, “I Hate oZONE.” She attended the forum and she said she appreciated the project team’s concern and their willingness to work on changes.

“I thought the forum was great,” Lawson said. “I wish more people had showed up, but I thought the information was good.”

Lawson said she will hopefully see a demo of the new system from the project team and explain some of what she sees to the Facebook group.