This year's answer (to the relief of many): Not much.

The filing window for the 2008-09 e-Rate funding cycle opens at noon on Nov. 7, 2007 and will close at 11:59 p.m. EST on Feb. 7, 2008.

Although in past years, e-Rate administrators have promoted a variety of new forms and rule changes, this year's training sessions are focusing on a "back to the basics" approach.

"The whole thrust this year is to try to get people to [understand that] when you do the basics right, your application generally goes right," said Mel Blackwell, vice president of the Universal Service Administrative Company's Schools and Libraries Division (SLD), the agency that administers the e-Rate.

"This year, we've kept it kind of static so we can focus on the basics. We've found over the years that some of the same basic mistakes keep cropping up--we're focusing on that," Blackwell said.

Despite this back-to-the-basics approach, there are a few new changes to the program, which provides telecommunications discounts of up to 90 percent for eligible schools and libraries.

One such change is more time for applicants to respond to requests for additional information from SLD. The amount of time has increased from seven to 15 days.

Another new change, Blackwell said, is that SLD will identify all items on e-Rate applications that are causes for denial.

In the past, the agency would stop at the first mistake it came to that would cause an applicant not to receive funding. If an applicant appealed SLD's decision and was successful, however, there might have been another denial waiting around the corner as the application proceeded.

Now, SLD will go through the entire application and will provide information on every mistake or cause for denial. This way, applicants will know about all the things that prevented them from receiving funding and will be able to apply that knowledge to the next year's application.

In the past, SLD was limited to 175 characters when describing what went awry with a school's application. Now, that limit has been increased to 2,000 characters.

SLD also announced that there will be "slight modifications" to the certifications found on Forms 470 and 471, but it has not announced when the new versions of the forms will be available.

Funding Year 2008, the program's eleventh year, runs from July 1, 2008 to June 30, 2009.

"The filing window is set to close about two weeks earlier than it did last year, which I think is a sign that the processes [SLD] has in place are even better than they were last year," said Scott Weston, executive director of information services for the eRate consulting firm Funds for Learning.