Sage, the academic record system used by students, faculty and staff transitioned from version 8.0 to 9.0 July 22. The upgrade is meant to ensure that the various components of sage are now easier to use.The upgrade features a new navigations toolbar, as well as visible links to finances and personal information areas. Many of the upgrades to sage are visible immediately upon logging in. Director of the Department of Administrative Information Systems Lisa Demings summarised the upgrade in an interview saying, "It's much easier to now find where you log in using your sage I.D. You also instantly know how much you owe the University."

In a campuswide e-mail July 26, Senior Vice President for Students and Enrollment Jean Eddy and Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Marty Krauss notified the Brandeis community that there would be limited access to sage between July 17 and July 20. The e-mail also explained that there would be no access to sage July 21 and that sage 9.0 would be complete and running July 22.

Krauss and Eddy sent out a second e-mail once the system upgrade to sage 9.0 was complete. Many offices throughout the University coordinated under Eddy and Krauss' leadership to complete the upgrade of sage 8.0 to sage 9.0.

Vice President and Vice Provost for Libraries and Information Technology and Chief Information Officer Perry Hanson said that the University server would not be able to support the necessary applications without the upgrade to sage 9.0.

" Once you get into these enterprise resource claiming tools, which we both use for financials and sage, then we have to upgrade on a regular basis, which is every few years depending on the system. We were close to the point in which the server would no longer be able to support us if we did not upgrade," Hanson explained.

"I oversee many of the offices responsible for SAGE- the Registrar, admissions, financial services to name a few. These offices use SAGE extensively and provide services to incoming and current students, so making sure that all of our data and functions could be replicated in the upgrade was really important to me," wrote Eddy in an e-mail to the Justice.

The University did not pay additional fees to upgrade to sage 9.0, according to Hanson. He added the University does not pay PeopleSoft, the server that created and maintains sage, for the upgrade. "We pay them maintenance, and the maintenance covers upgrades to the system," Hanson explained.

Regarding future updates to sage, Hanson said, "We will be doing some behind-the-scenes stuff, but we hope that none of it affects what the students see and use, so for at least the next year things will stay the same."

Nathan Koskella '13 appreciates the informative and inviting look of sage 9.0. "Where the old layout was austere and cold, the new form is like a book" Koskella said.

However, other students, such as John Jesus Orr '12, do not like the upgraded software.

"I think [sage 9.0] is confusing to navigate and that the construction of the initial menu and getting back and forth between pages could be done a lot better," Orr said.