Information Services Planned Upgrades This Month - Information Services

Information Services

Information Services Planned Upgrades This Month

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Monday, May 21, 2018 and Tuesday, May 22, 2018:  The Blackboard Transact system is being upgraded

The Blackboard Transact system, also known as the BearPass Card system, will be down for a major upgrade on Monday and Tuesday, May 21 and 22. We will be upgrading the Transact database and application, as well as moving it to new hardware. I want to highlight some important points about this upgrade that will be of interest to you:

What will continue to work:

  • Any and all door access will continue to function during this upgrade because the S2 Security System, which controls door access, will remain online.
  • All cash registers will continue to operate but will be in offline mode.  When the new server is up and running, the registers will come online and upload their transactions.  For cash register locations that will be open, such as Chick-Fil-A and the Art Supply Store, we will be ready to install an upgraded cash register while the upgrade is occurring, or immediately thereafter.  For cash registers in locations not opened, new transactions cannot occur until the register has been upgraded to the new version.  After the existing register has uploaded any offline transactions, we will replace it with an upgraded register and verify that transactions are able to process in a live, online manner.
  • The Bearpass Card Office will be open during this time; however, the ability to print cards will be unavailable until the upgrade is complete.

What will be unavailable:

  • The BearPass Door Access system will be offline. This means that the ability to add or remove door access will not be available during this upgrade. The reason for this is the flow of the door access permissions through the system; door access is assigned to a person in Blackboard Transact, then propagated to the S2 Security system. Taking Door Access Control offline prevents any loss of synchronization between the two systems for door access.

Technology-Related Service Interruptions:  Information Services Planned Upgrade Day  

Routine upgrades to the University’s mission critical networking, telecommunications, information security, and information systems are necessary to provide reliable and secure services to the University community. These upgrades are scheduled for times when the disruption to the University community is minimized. Departments and users are encouraged to plan accordingly and not expect access to the University’s communications and information technologies during the upgrade period of 12:00 a.m. to 11:59 p.m.

  • May 26 – brief Internet outage at midnight.
  • May 26 – upgrade of the ERP Banner computing hardware and database infrastructure.
  • May 27 – upgrade of the networking core routers to provide better redundancy.