By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

As anyone who has ever switched computer systems can tell you, there are always a few bumps on the road to greater productivity. At TIME we rely on the crackerjack efforts of our technical-support group--fondly called techies--led by Maureen Kelly, Ken Baierlein and Susanna Schrobsdorff, to smooth out those rough patches. For the past year and a half, we have been converting all our news and editorial offices from a piecemeal conglomeration of scattered PCs and several mainframe computers to a fully integrated, Macintosh-based publishing network. Now writers can see on their own computer screens the photographs that will accompany the articles they're working on, and all of us have access to the Internet. "It's a harder system to maintain, and it's more complex to use than our old system," Baierlein admits. "But it's much more powerful, which allows us to do more with it."

Journalists can be as wary of change as the next group, and in the beginning many on the editorial staff were less than thrilled with the new equipment. There were new commands to learn and new ways to make mistakes. There were some famous bloopers--like the time the system refused to release the cover story to the copy editors. "At one point, I had five techies in my office," recalls senior writer Michael Lemonick. "Ken was saying 'Wow, I've never seen anything like that.'" It seemed the magazine might miss its deadline. But the techies solved that problem, as they have every other one that has come up--from random crashes to overlapping print--and the going has be come smoother.

Now the conversion is almost complete. Nora Jupiter has just returned from upgrading the computers in our Jerusalem bureau, and in two weeks Lamarr Tsufura will be leaving for Mexico City. "The hand wringing is almost over, and all that's left is the hand holding," says David Richardson, who converted our news bureaus in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston and Miami. And wouldn't you know, many of those initial skeptics have been won over to the new system--thanks in no small part to the efforts of the tech team.