The administrative control panel enables the administrator to assign different powers to different users, such as the ability to edit or just inspect a syllabus, roster, or calendar, for example, and the ability to create sysadmins, administrators, instructors, teaching assistants, or students, each of whom have different levels of authorization within the system. The registration wizard can be customized to work with any student information system. The server administrator can pre-configure the settings via the serf.cfg file. There is also a trace that the administrator can turn on to trace very detailed information about user activity. The administrative control panel is Web-based, enabling administrators to log on from any remote location to monitor or administer the Serf server.
Students can get help via e-mail or in the course newsgroups or forums.
A jumpstart pamphlet provides each student with startup instructions at the beginning of a course. Full email technical support and hot-line service on request. Instructors' mailing list is also available. In practice, the server configuration and bandwidth available within the institution will limit this further, but Serf imposes no limits other than the 32-bit addressing used in Java and SQL Server. In practice, the server configuration and bandwidth available within the institution will limit this further, but Serf imposes no limits other than the 32-bit addressing used in Java and SQL Server.