[BB] SafeAssignment Performance Update

SafeAssignment users,

This note came in Friday from SafeAssignment. It appears that they have
applied one more fix for institutions with more than 800 instructors
registered in Blackboard. That would be us! The final line says to
please let them know if you experience response times of more than 10
seconds. If you click on a SafeAssignment link and it takes more than
10 seconds for the page to come up, let me know and I will pass it on to
our contact at SafeAssignment.

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

-----Original Message-----
From: SafeAssignment/MyDropBox Suite Team
[mailto:developers@safeassignment.com]
Sent: Friday, October 06, 2006 3:02 PM
To: sa-admins@safeassignment.com
Subject: *** SafeAssignment Performance Update

Dear SafeAssignment Administrator,

We are glad to inform you that today we were finally able to fix a
database bug that caused slow SafeAssignment response times in certain
institutions.
This bug affected institutions with many (800+) instructors registered
in the Blackboard system, and now, after this bug has been fixed, such
institutions should experience performance increase by 5-10 times in
most operations with response times ranging from 1 to 3 seconds in 99%
of cases.

We will implement another significant performance improvement later this
weekend or early next week, depending on how successful our reliability
tests are, and after that SafeAssignment should provide response times
comparable to response times of a typical Blackboard server in all
institutions.

We want to thank you for your patience and support, with special thanks
to those Blackboard administrators that provided us with access to their
systems and tremendously helped us in discovering the issues that slowed
the system down.

Please contact us if you still experience response times of over 10
seconds anywhere within your system, so that we could investigate your
specific case.

Thank you very much for using our products.

Best regards,
MyDropBox Development Team

[BB] Blackboard E-mail problems?

Bb Users,

 

We are getting repeated reports of e-mail problems on Blackboard.  Teachers are sending to the entire class and no-one is getting it, according to what we have been told.  In other classes the e-mail is working fine.

 

If you are having e-mail problems where your class is not receiving your e-mail, and you are willing to let me send some test messages to your class to try to figure out what is happening, please let me know, so that I can take steps to identify the cause of the problem and get it resolved.

 

Bill Vilberg

Assoc. Dir. of Instructional Advancement

305-284-3944

 

[BB] SafeAssignment Progress Update

Bb listserv members,

I just wanted to keep you updated with steps that SafeAssignment is
taking to eliminate the problems that we experienced last month. They
have applied a patch to the database, probably to improve their search
techniques. Hopefully this patch will improve things as it is applied
to the databases of the various schools using SafeAssignment. Sometimes
a patch such as this requires building new indexes or tables, to the
rollout takes some time.

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

-----Original Message-----
From: SafeAssignment/MyDropBox Suite Team
[mailto:developers@safeassignment.com]
Sent: Saturday, September 30, 2006 5:35 PM
To: sa-admins@safeassignment.com
Subject: *** SafeAssignment Progress Update and Downtime Warning (!!!)

Dear Technology Administrator,

We are happy to notify you that a significant increase of SafeAssignment
response speed is coming soon. We will be installing a database system
patch this weekend will be gradually introducing it into the production
environment over the next week. This improvement should make
SafeAssignment response time to equal to or better than the response
time you experienced last spring/summer.

***Please note that installation of this patch will require a full
database system shutdown for about 15-20 minutes. This shutdown is
planned for 11:00 PM EST this Saturday, September 30. We are sorry for
such a late notice, but we have just finished testing the patch and want
to implement it as soon as possible to prevent any issues that some
users may still periodically experience.

Thank you very much for your support and understanding.

Best regards
MyDropBox Developers Team