The Office of Student Financial Aid will begin running the 1998-99 version of a software system called Student Aid Management on Feb. 15.The software will advance Ohio State to at least late 1980s or early 1990s technology and will allow mainframe-to-mainframe transmission of direct loan data with the federal government.The software will make the system more efficient and ensure timely service to students, said Natala Hart, director of student financial aid. The current system being used in the office has a mid-70s look, Hart said.”It’s been out-of-date for more than a decade, during which time we’ve added a great deal more functions to it,” she said.Ten years ago, the system was near collapse, Hart said. “We’ve used it 10 more years, and in the last three years we’ve added the direct lending function which serves 21,000 students and will deal with data transmission for $125 million this year on top of a failing system,” she said. Hart said OSU is the only large university in the country that still operates its direct lending program the old way. OSU contacts government mainframe computers from PCs in the financial aid office, she said. Other large institutions operate from a mainframe computer to the government’s mainframe.Technology advances quickly, so it has been difficult to decide when to update the computers, Hart said. Whenever they would think about updating, something new would develop, she said. The software and its installation has cost the university $1.38 million. The software cost $180,000, and the remaining $1.2 million went to personnel and machine installation costs, Hart said.The financial aid office had planned to have the new system operating by Oct. 1, 1997 and run it in parallel testing with the current system from then until Jan. 1, Hart said. After that, the new system was to have received all file updates, but this timeline has been pushed back.The new system needed to be updated to be century compliant, so parallel testing hasn’t gone as planned, Hart said.Software that isn’t century compliant will have problems operating beginning in the year 2000.”We’ve brought up the 1997-98 version of the new system and we began to implement it in parallel and we do have some opportunity to look at it in parallel fashion,” she said.Sigma, Inc. of Denver, the software’s designer, offers programs that will give students access to their financial aid information over the World Wide Web, Hart said.”This was always on our agenda,” she said. “This will allow us just to plug in some web translation technology and more quickly and more readily use web technology to allow students to inquire about their financial aid process.”She said the programs come with all of the appropriate security standards.Some of the web services will be offered within a year and should be fully implemented within three years, Hart said. Then, as many as 70 percent of the inquiries to financial aid could be accessed by students on the web.