Planned Student Administration Systems Downtime – 10-11 November

We are pleased to confirm that the Student Administration Systems migration has been successfully completed, and all systems are now available.

While most users should not notice any significant changes, this marks a major milestone for the University. Our key Student Administration Systems have been moved from physical infrastructure on the Edinburgh campus to a modern cloud-hosted platform, supported by our partners Strata Information Group (SIG).

This has been a significant programme of work over many months, and we'd like to extend our sincere thanks to colleagues across Global IS and SIG for their hard work and commitment, particularly over the last few days.

We have one outstanding issue, and a separate incident will be created for this.

Thank you for your patience and support throughout this migration. We appreciate your understanding while we complete the final stages of stabilisation and address the remaining known issues.

The scheduled maintenance is now underway. We'll keep you updated on our progress.

Following a meeting earlier today with key stakeholders, it has been confirmed that we are proceeding as planned.

To allow IS colleagues and external contractors to begin preparatory activities, user access to the systems will be removed from 17:00 GMT 17:00 GMT (21:00 GST / 01:00(+1) MST) on Monday 9th November.

As part of our ongoing programme to migrate our student administration systems to new cloud-based infrastructure, we are planning a period of service downtime on 10 and 11 November. This downtime is necessary to support the migration activities and ensure a smooth transition to the new environment. During this period, some services may be unavailable or experience intermittent disruption.

Students will not be disadvantaged by any deadlines or actions affected by the system downtime, but should complete any outstanding requirements as soon as the systems are restored.

Systems Affected

A summary of the services affected is below

• Banner
• Student Self Service
• Faculty Self Service (including marks and grades transfer)
• OBI Reporting
• Online Payments
• Student Timetables
• Workflow and Banner Document Manager
• Registry Interface
• Helpdesk application
• Any integration or data feeds in/out of Banner
  • CRM Recruit and Akari GCM will remain available and can be used, however any changes will not interface to Banner until after the work has been completed
  • Systems such as Canvas and Library should be unaffected, with data feeds resuming once the systems have been restored.

Minimising Disruption

To minimise disruption, we are planning to make one of our non-production environments available to staff, with a recent copy of the data from our live systems. While this data cannot be updated, and could be a few hours out of date, it will give users access to core data such as student contact details and an overview of their student records should they be required during this period. More information will be provided nearer the time.

Contingency Planning

At this stage, we expect the migration to proceed on 10-11 November, and we will provide further updates and confirmation closer to the implementation date, however to minimise risk and maintain flexibility within the project schedule, we have also identified the following contingency (fall-back) windows should circumstances require us to postpone the activity: • 17-18 November • 24-25 November

We appreciate your understanding and cooperation as we undertake this important infrastructure upgrade, which will provide a more resilient and sustainable platform for our student administration systems. Thank you for your support.