There’s a Scheduled ConnectCarolina Outage… When you see that message on the ConnectCarolina Notifications or Announcement tiles, you probably check the date and time, and notice that, most of the time, it’s not occurring during work hours. When you log into ConnectCarolina after the outage, you may think, “I don’t see any difference, so, what was the outage for?”
While it’s true that often you won’t see changes in the ConnectCarolina screens or the way you work in them after an outage, there’s a lot going on behind-the-scenes that’s making ConnectCarolina work better for you. Consider a few of the reasons there are ConnectCarolina outages:
- Applying software updates: ConnectCarolina is built on PeopleSoft software. If we don’t keep up with the latest version, we could find ourselves without technical support or vulnerable to security bugs. Sometimes we’re patching and doing bug fixes on the software. A patch is a set of changes meant to update, fix, or improve the software or its supporting data.
- Semester census process. You’re probably familiar with this 5:00 pm to midnight outage that occurs a few weeks into each semester when we “count” the student population. We need to freeze student information to take the snapshot, and that means an outage, mostly to the Student Administration component of ConnectCarolina.
In the next edition of the ConnectCarolina Newsletter, we’ll take a closer look at the processes and people who do the work when ConnectCarolina is offline.