[BB] Janet's last day at UM

Blackboard mailing list people,

 

Janet de la Rosa, our Blackboard system manager and IAC systems analyst since last December, is taking a job as Senior Instructional Designer at Miami Dade College.  Today is her last day at UM.  We certainly wish her the best in her new position.

 

For continued Blackboard support, our recommended procedure is to click on the "Help" icon at the top of any Blackboard page, and then use the "Contact us" link to access a support request form.  That will get you the fastest response since it is monitored by our students as well as by me.

 

Hopefully the position will be posted soon and we will have a replacement in place quickly, so that you can continue to receive quality support for Blackboard.

 

Bill Vilberg

Assoc. Dir. of Instructional Advancement

305-284-3944

 

[BB] Clearing attempts in SafeAssignment

Hello Blackboard Users,

 

We’ve received word that clearing attempts from the View Safe Assignment page (MyDropbox Suite/SA link) through the Control Panel fails with the new upgrade (v. 2.0.7) on our Blackboard version 6.3.1.  In order to clear attempts from a submission that a student has made, you would need to do it from the Gradebook. To do this, open the Gradebook, click on the grade or “!” matching the corresponding submission to open it, and then on the Modify Grade page, click on the Clear Attempt button.

 

The company has informed us that they are working on a fix for our version during the next few days.  We will let you know as soon as they do.

 

Thank you and we apologize for this inconvenience.

 

Sincerely,

 

Janet De La Rosa

----------------------------------------------------------

Janet De La Rosa (janet.delarosa@miami.edu)

Systems Analyst & Blackboard Manager

Instructional Advancement Center

University of Miami 

Coral Gables, FL

www.miami.edu

-----------------------------------------------------------

 

[BB] Blackboard not accessible through the wireless network

Blackboard Users,

 

IT is no longer blocking access to Blackboard. The wireless issue has been resolved. Please let us know if you have any questions.

 

 

Sincerely,

 

Janet De La Rosa

----------------------------------------------------------

Janet De La Rosa (janet.delarosa@miami.edu)

Systems Analyst & Blackboard Manager

Instructional Advancement Center

University of Miami 

Coral Gables, FL

www.miami.edu

-----------------------------------------------------------

 

[BB] Blackboard not accessible through the wireless network

Hello Blackboard Users,

 

We were informed that Blackboard is not accessible through the Wireless network at the moment. We are currently working with IT to get this resolved. We will let you know as soon as it’s been repaired.

 

Sincerely,

 

Janet De La Rosa

----------------------------------------------------------

Janet De La Rosa (janet.delarosa@miami.edu)

Systems Analyst & Blackboard Manager

Instructional Advancement Center

University of Miami 

Coral Gables, FL

www.miami.edu

-----------------------------------------------------------

 

[BB] Bb - Safe Assignment Problem

Blackboard Users,

 

Below is an email that we received from SafeAssignment regarding the improvement of their component within Blackboard. I am passing this along to let you know the status of the situation.

 

Please let us know if you experience any difficulty or if you have any questions.

 

 

Sincerely,

 

 

Janet De La Rosa

 

 

 

Dear Technology Administrator,

 

We are happy to inform you that SafeAssignment is finally functioning normally.  A new system update implemented this morning (Friday, Sep. 15) increased the processing speed to fully usable levels, providing response times of less than 2 seconds for 99% of requests.  Some rare slow-downs with response times up to 5-6 seconds are still possible, but they should be extremely rare and brief, with response times still within acceptable limits.  We have also shut off the page reload blocking system as it is no longer needed, so you should not see the "Please do not reload this Web page" error messages any more.

 

 

Please note that this is not the main fix that we are still working on, and performance of the system will dramatically improve over the next two weeks, but current performance of SafeAssignment should be comparable to the performance levels you experienced before this crisis.  We have also started working on a software stress-testing system to ensure that no components of our processing system would cause such situations in the future.

 

Thank you very much for your patience and support.  We sincerely apologize for any inconveniences caused by this incident.

 

Best regards

 

MyDropBox Developers Team

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

----------------------------------------------------------

Janet De La Rosa (janet.delarosa@miami.edu)

Systems Analyst

Instructional Advancement Center

University of Miami 

Coral Gables, FL

www.miami.edu

-----------------------------------------------------------

 

[BB] Bb - SafeAssignment Problem

Blackboard Users,

 

Below is an email that we received from SafeAssignment regarding the performance of their component within Blackboard. I am passing this along to let you know the status of the situation.  Please let us know if you experience any difficulty or if you have any questions.

 

Sincerely,

 

Janet De La Rosa

 

 

 

 

Dear Technology Administrator,

 

We regret to inform you that SafeAssignment performance issues are still not resolved completely.  A new system update implemented this morning resulted in further performance improvements in all areas, and most importantly significantly reduced the percentage of time when SafeAssignment is "slow".

Now SafeAssignment provides close to normal response times (1-5 seconds) most of the day with slower response only during peak load hours.

 

We still do not have an exact ETA for the ultimate fix, but we have already identified a number of possible optimizations that should bring SafeAssignment performance to a normal level even before the fix is implemented.  We will continue working on fixing the main bug and implementing performance optimizations simultaneously.  Tomorrow we will install one more update, which can reduce the "slow" periods to just few minutes a day or completely eliminate them.  This issue will remain our top priority until we can ensure response times of less than 2 seconds on 99% of requests.

 

We are very sorry for these inconveniences and appreciate your patience and understanding.

 

 

Best regards

 

MyDropBox Developers Team

 

 

 

----------------------------------------------------------

Janet De La Rosa (janet.delarosa@miami.edu)

Systems Analyst

Instructional Advancement Center

University of Miami 

Coral Gables, FL

www.miami.edu

-----------------------------------------------------------

 

[BB] Bb - SafeAssignment Problems

Hello Blackboard Users,

 

This morning the new release of building block 2.0.7 was applied to SafeAssignment within Blackboard.  I went ahead and checked the functionality in a few courses and the system still appeared to be a bit slow.  I contacted their technicians and they stated that many clients are currently applying this new format so the system load is high.  It should improve by later today according to Safe Assignment.

 

Please let us know if you encounter any problems or issues regarding SafeAssignment. Thank you for your patience and again, we apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused.

 

 

Sincerely,

 

Janet De La Rosa

----------------------------------------------------------

Janet De La Rosa (janet.delarosa@miami.edu)

Systems Analyst and Blackboard Manager

Instructional Advancement Center

University of Miami 

Coral Gables, FL

www.miami.edu

-----------------------------------------------------------

 

[BB] Bb - SafeAssignment Problems

Blackboard Users,

 

In relation to the previous email sent this afternoon concerning the SafeAssignment issue; the company has informed us that the new release will be available sometime tomorrow morning. We will let you know once this update has been made.

 

Again, we apologize for this inconvenience.

 

 

Sincerely,

 

Janet De La Rosa

-----------------------------------------------------------

Janet De La Rosa (janet.delarosa@miami.edu)

Systems Analyst

Instructional Advancement Center

University of Miami 

Coral Gables, FL

www.miami.edu

-----------------------------------------------------------

 

[BB] Bb - SafeAssignment Problems

Blackboard users,

 

The Safe Assignment component of Blackboard is having problems.  The company, MyDropBox, states that their database currently has a bug resulting in slow processing times; pages that take 2-3 minutes to appear.  An error page is generated, when the user clicks twice on the “MyDropBox Suite/SafeAssignment” link within the Control Panel of the course. If you experience the slow processing when clicking on “My Dropbox Suite/SafeAssignment” from the control panel once, it’s best not to click the link twice because the error page will come up.  Safe Assignment should load but it may take a couple of minutes.

 

The company is working on the problem and they state that a new release will be available today for resolving this issue. 

  

As always, we apologize.  If you need help assistance, remember to click on the "Help" icon at the top of any page in Blackboard, and then click on "Contact Us" to open a ticket.  That is the best way to receive assistance from our team promptly.

 

 

Sincerely,

 

Janet De La Rosa

 

----------------------------------------------------------

Janet De La Rosa (janet.delarosa@miami.edu)

Systems Analyst and Blackboard Manager

Instructional Advancement Center

University of Miami 

Coral Gables, FL

www.miami.edu

-----------------------------------------------------------

 

[BB] SafeAssignment Issues

Update on the SafeAssignment issue...

Bill Vilberg
Assoc. Dir. of Instructional Advancement
305-284-3944

-----Original Message-----
From: SafeAssignment/MyDropBox Suite Team
[mailto:developers@safeassignment.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 5:50 PM
To: sa-admins@safeassignment.com
Subject: SafeAssignment Issues

Dear Technology Administrator,

Today SafeAssignment/MyDropBox Suite products episodically experienced
the same issues that were described yesterday. The issues had a
different cause but had similar influence on user experience. We
identified the cause of the issues and implemented a temporary solution
that fixes everything except periodical slowness of some requests, which
should not be as bad as it was during the last day and a half.
Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee that the problems will not return
until we implement a permanent solution. The permanent solution is
being developed now and is expected to be implemented by Monday. We
will do everything possible to minimize any possible inconveniences
until complete resolution of all current issues.

We are very sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience
and support.

--
Best regards,
SafeAssignment Development Team

[BB] SafeAssignmentl problems at UM

Blackboard users,

 

The SafeAssignment problem was reportedly resolved at 10:00 AM this morning, but has just returned.  The problems seem to be sporadic and effect only some interactions with the servers some of the time.  So waiting 30 seconds of so and trying again, will often overcome error messages.  The best solution for a blank screen is to wait up to 2 minutes for the page to appear.  If it doesn't. try again.  In both cases, use the "Back" button in your browser and then try whatever you were doing.  Just reloading the page will probably not work. 

 

Bill Vilberg

Assoc. Dir. of Instructional Advancement

305-284-3944

 

---

From: Max Lytvyn [mailto:max.lytvyn@sciworth.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 2:48 PM
To: Vilberg, William R.
Subject: RE: Still problems at UM

Hi Bill,

 

The problems were resolved by about 10:00 today, but just came back.  We are experiencing the same situation as yesterday now, but for a different reason which is yet unknown.  We will send more information out as soon as we at least know what happened.  I am very sorry for this.

 

 

Best regards

 

Max Lytvyn, MBA
====================================
Director of Marketing and Business Development
MyDropBox Family of Products
Sciworth Inc.
Phone: 888-412-0973 ext. 8

International Line: 1-416-907-0703
Fax: 888-479-5874

From: Vilberg, William R. [mailto:bill.vilberg@miami.edu]
Sent: September 7, 2006 2:41 PM
To: Max Lytvyn
Subject: Still problems at UM
Importance: High

 

Max,

 

The last notice I got was yesterday, saying that EVERYTHING would be resolved by 8:30 AM today.  We just got a call from a faculty member.  When he went to check a set of Safe Assignment papers, he got the error message about a problem connecting to the backend server.  When we tried the same thing, we got an empty page.

 

What is the status on the problem that you were working on yesterday?

 

Bill Vilberg

Assoc. Dir. of Instructional Advancement

305-284-3944

 

[BB] Safe Assignment problems

Blackboard users,

 

The Safe Assignment component of Blackboard is having problems.  The company, MyDropBox, performed some "critical performance and stability updates" between 8:30 and 9:30 this morning, resulting in a series of short service outages.  Since then there have been some additional issues that have created problems.  The symptom is an incredibly long page of Oracle errors, with instructions that you should contact me and send me the complete error report.

 

The company is working on the problem and says that all delays will be completely resolved by 8:30 AM tomorrow, Thursday. 

 

Meanwhile, if you experience the problem, use the "Back" button on your browser to return to the previous page, and resubmit the request.  The outages are short enough that you should get through again fairly quickly.  At least that is what they said.

 

As always, we apologize for the problem.  If you need help with this or anything else, remember that you can click on the "Help" icon at the top of any page in Blackboard, and then click on "Contact Us" to open a ticket.  That is the best way to receive assistance from our team.

 

Bill Vilberg