Axess Update: Student Enrollment for Spring Quarter

The student experience during the opening of spring quarter enrollment on March 1 was unacceptable. University IT and the Office of the University Registrar know it is distressing to not be able to log in and immediately begin to enroll for classes. We deeply regret the impact experienced by students. 

At 9 p.m. on March 1, Stanford opened our enrollment system to all students for Spring Quarter. From 9:02 p.m. to 9:17 p.m., students could not complete their enrollment process. This outage was uniform, and affected all students equally. After 9:17 p.m., the system reopened for class enrollment. This outage was caused by the underlying PeopleSoft student information system being overwhelmed by the surge in volume that was enabled by our new SimpleEnroll web application.

After last fall’s outage, we created the new SimpleEnroll standalone web application that removed login dependency on the vendor-provided Axess portal to address system bottlenecks. We saw significant improvements in Axess and SimpleEnroll performance during the Dec. 1 Winter Quarter enrollment.  

SimpleEnroll has addressed technical issues that previously limited Axess class registration throughput; however, the underlying PeopleSoft transaction system cannot accommodate the surge of requests that has now been enabled during the early minutes of class enrollment. Efforts to scale PeopleSoft throughput have already been maximized to the legacy system’s limits. 

To mitigate challenges with our current system’s limitations and improve our student enrollment experience, we are pursuing alternate options for enrollment management. This will be the focus of our collective efforts going forward. Details outlining the approach will follow. 

We encourage students to continue to provide us feedback through this feedback form. Be assured, we read every single student submission. We appreciate your patience, engagement, and understanding as we move toward a better enrollment experience for our students. 

Steve Gallagher
University Chief Information Officer

Johanna Metzgar
Associate Vice Provost for Student and Academic Services and University Registrar