Portal failures cause campus-wide inconveniences
Michale D. Johnson
Issue date: 10/29/09 Section: News
New software updates to the My Southeast portal have been causing campus-wide inconveniences for students and teachers over the past few weeks.
"We understand how it affects the campus community. We're not happy about it and we know campus isn't," Archie Sprengel, Assistant Vice President for the Information Technology Department, said. "It's very inconvenient."
Routine maintenance is not uncommon to keep the portal operating, but Sprengel said this was "the first major upgrade on the portal since we started it up."
Still, students like Southeast junior Jared Brewer can't understand why changing the portal was necessary.
"There was nothing wrong with it before," Brewer said. "I don't know why it needed to be updated."
According to Sprengel, updates had to be made because SunGard, the vendor that provides the portal, will not support the old banner system next year.
Planning for the new portal system began last year, Sprengel said. The problems started as sort of a technological domino effect. The idea was to update the banner--the student self-service section of the portal--to make it easier to navigate, however, that could not be done without updating the entire portal itself.
The new portal started running on Oct. 7, and the banner was updated during fall break. "Considerable testing" was done, Sprengel said, but that testing was done on a small scale.
"You can't test everything without all your users. There was no way to do a test until we got that many people on there," Sprengel said. And, as many students found out, problems arose.
For the first two days after fall break the portal was down for a total of six hours. Normally, the portal can support between 800-1,000 users at a time. After the upgrades, the server became "upset" when it reached around 500 users, Sprengel said.
Brewer was one student disrupted by the portal's temper tantrum.
"I needed to email two of my teachers," Brewer said. "I had trouble accessing email and logging on to portal three days in a row."
"We understand how it affects the campus community. We're not happy about it and we know campus isn't," Archie Sprengel, Assistant Vice President for the Information Technology Department, said. "It's very inconvenient."
Routine maintenance is not uncommon to keep the portal operating, but Sprengel said this was "the first major upgrade on the portal since we started it up."
Still, students like Southeast junior Jared Brewer can't understand why changing the portal was necessary.
"There was nothing wrong with it before," Brewer said. "I don't know why it needed to be updated."
According to Sprengel, updates had to be made because SunGard, the vendor that provides the portal, will not support the old banner system next year.
Planning for the new portal system began last year, Sprengel said. The problems started as sort of a technological domino effect. The idea was to update the banner--the student self-service section of the portal--to make it easier to navigate, however, that could not be done without updating the entire portal itself.
The new portal started running on Oct. 7, and the banner was updated during fall break. "Considerable testing" was done, Sprengel said, but that testing was done on a small scale.
"You can't test everything without all your users. There was no way to do a test until we got that many people on there," Sprengel said. And, as many students found out, problems arose.
For the first two days after fall break the portal was down for a total of six hours. Normally, the portal can support between 800-1,000 users at a time. After the upgrades, the server became "upset" when it reached around 500 users, Sprengel said.
Brewer was one student disrupted by the portal's temper tantrum.
"I needed to email two of my teachers," Brewer said. "I had trouble accessing email and logging on to portal three days in a row."
Viewing Comments 1 - 1 of 1
Henry Winkler
posted 11/02/09 @ 5:45 PM CST
You are an idiot man. You are dissing the portal so bad when the 2 most major uses of the portal are courses and e-mail. Archie explained workarounds for both of those items yet that seems to be all you focus on and how it doesn't work when it in fact does. (Continued…)
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