Status Announcements

ACTIVE students have been migrated to Office 365 and should have all received a final message on our old mail server.  If you are an active student and can not log in to Office 365 at portal.office.com, please contact the CTS Helpdesk at helpdesk@potsdam.edu or 315-267-4444.  If you are directed to voice mail, leave a message with contact information and someone will return your call. GRADUATED students (Alumni) will be migrated in groups this week.  If you are an alumnus, do not attempt to use Outlook/Office 365 until you receive notification that you have been migrated.

Here are instructions for creating an e-mail signature in the web version of Outlook: http://blogs.potsdam.edu/network/o365-creating-an…ture-web-version/

Moodle maintenance is complete. Technical difficulties resulted in it taking an hour longer than anticipated. Our apologies, and thank your for your understanding. The maintenance should allow CTS to make a faster and smoother transition to the hosted Moodle service planned for this Fall semester.

There have been unexpected problems encountered during the moodle maintenance. Announcements will be made periodically or when service is restored.

The Moodle outage announced earlier today will commence in approximately five (5) minutes. Please wrap up any activity and log out at soon as possible. Another announcement will be sent when the maintenance is over, which should be within a half hour.

To the Campus Community: The Moodle maintenance window scheduled for Friday, August 19th has been canceled and tentatively rescheduled for Friday, August 26th at 8:00 P. M. to Saturday, August 27th at 8:00 A. M. Moodle will be unavailable during this time. Please plan your Fall 2016 course preparation accordingly. We have delayed in order to ensure that our Moodle migration is as transparent and minimally disruptive to you as possible. We have encountered a small subset of very large Moodle courses that have been problematic to the migration process during testing. Our team is working to resolve this issue so that we can complete the final migration to our new hosting provider in a timely manner. We also continue to configure and test the course shell request and creation process to ensure that it works seamlessly in the new Moodle environment.

There will be a brief Moodle outage today (Thursday 8/18) at 4:30 pm. CTS will be upgrading the resources assigned to the server to improve its performance. The outage is expected to be brief; no more than half an hour. Announcements will be posted at the start and end of the maintenance.

ITEC will be upgrading hardware which will make all hosted services unavailable between 4-6am on Wednesday August 20th. The hosted services include Banner/BearPAWS/BearDeN.

The cloud hosting company for the College web site has announced a maintenance window from 11:00 pm Wednesday (Aug 17) to 7:00 am Thursday (Aug 18). The hosting company states that according to plan, “Sites may see a momentary interruption in site traffic” at some point during this window. This will affect only the main College web site. It will not affect moodle, email, or other services.

To The Campus Community: CTS has worked diligently this summer to upgrade and improve a number of the mission-critical technologies utilized by faculty, staff, and students. I am pleased to inform you that we will be moving Moodle to an off-campus hosting provider, as well upgrading to the latest version of the platform. An extended maintenance window will be required to complete the project. During this window, Moodle will be unavailable while final course data is migrated from our on-campus servers to the new hosting provider. Please be advised that we are tentatively planning for Moodle to be unavailable beginning Friday, August 19th at 8:00 P. M. until approximately Saturday, August 20th at 8:00 A. M. to complete the migration. Please plan accordingly. Any changes to our current plan will be announced by Thursday evening, and a confirmation email will be sent to the campus on Friday. What does this migration mean for you? You can continue to prepare your Fall 2016 courses right up until 8:00 P. M. on Friday, August 19th. At that time, a copy of all your data will be moved to the upgraded Moodle site at our hosting provider. Beginning Saturday, August 20th, you can continue to prepare courses at the new Moodle site. All your data from our current Moodle site will be available to you in the new one. Past semester course data will also be migrated to the new system. Course shell request processes will remain the same for our new site. Procedures for seeking help remain the same. Please contact moodlesupport@potsdam.edufor assistance with Moodle specific issues. Please contact helpdesk@potsdam.edu for assistance with username and passwords. Why are we migrating Moodle now? We have very few, small windows where such a migration can take place without affecting live courses. While there is never a perfect time for such an outage, this window, between summer session final grade submission and the beginning of the fall semester, is the most suitable for a migration of this size. The new Moodle site will be more stable and reliable, utilizing the Amazon Web Services cloud for hosting. We wanted to have this stability in place before this coming academic year.