Difference between pages "06/20/07 - Administrative Offices: Office 2007 Next Steps" and "07/30/09 - Computer upgrade work over the next few days"

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In a week or so Computer Support will announce the availability of the Office 2007 upgrade. There are some things to check before introducing it into your department's software ecology 
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Over the next few days Computer Support Services staff will be performing upgrades on our core data storage systems. There should be no service outages related to this work, but with work of this kind there is always the possibility of an unforeseen problem resulting in an outage.
 
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1. If you have commercial software which interacts with Office you should seek assurance about compatibility with Office 2007 before your department goes through the upgrade.  If you have automation developed in house you should contact the Help Desk about how you can test it with Office 2007 and assure yourself that it will not be broken by the upgrade.
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Friday morning, July 31st, we will upgrade the main disk storage system for critical services such as the main web pages, First Class, and other applications. The upgrade should not interupt the functioning of those systems and we do not anticipate any downtime.
 
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2. Get trained on the new look and menu structure. The May Word, Excel and Powerpoint workshops will be repeated in August.  Or earlier if there is enough interest.  Call Melissa James x5543 in Lifelong Learning  and get on the list.
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Monday and Tuesday morning we will be physically moving the servers that host many critical and non-critical services. Services running on those servers will be reassigned to other hardware during the move with no downtime for the services involved. (Email me if you're interested in how that works).
 
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3. Encourage all users you share Office files with to install the compatibility patch so that different versions of Office will read each other's files. See http://techhelp.mcla.edu/converter.
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These upgrades and relocations will take us a big step forward towards our goal of complete redundancy for all systems. We are working towards a world where critical systems will continue to function in the face of major hardware failures or even the loss of an entire building to fire or other calamity.  
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Several administrative offices have special purpose software packages that are crucial to the service they deliver.  Major ones, such as Raiser's Edge in Alumni/Development or HRCMS in Personnel have large companies behind them which can be queried about issues that may arise when using them with Office 2007 software or documents. Computer Support Services has contacted several offices with those that we are aware of and we have already started to identify where problems may exist and where the upgrade will not create an issue.
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We appreciate your support as we work to provide reliable and robust information technology systems for MCLA.
 
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There are other cases in which Computer Support may not be aware of such critical software or in which the "software" may be an Excel spread sheet or Access database that was developed in house. In these cases we have to depend on department staff to identify the potential for trouble. Clearly, you do not want to do an Office upgrade that will prevent you from using your accounting system.
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-Mark Berman

Latest revision as of 19:27, 27 January 2021

Over the next few days Computer Support Services staff will be performing upgrades on our core data storage systems. There should be no service outages related to this work, but with work of this kind there is always the possibility of an unforeseen problem resulting in an outage.

Friday morning, July 31st, we will upgrade the main disk storage system for critical services such as the main web pages, First Class, and other applications. The upgrade should not interupt the functioning of those systems and we do not anticipate any downtime.

Monday and Tuesday morning we will be physically moving the servers that host many critical and non-critical services. Services running on those servers will be reassigned to other hardware during the move with no downtime for the services involved. (Email me if you're interested in how that works).

These upgrades and relocations will take us a big step forward towards our goal of complete redundancy for all systems. We are working towards a world where critical systems will continue to function in the face of major hardware failures or even the loss of an entire building to fire or other calamity.

We appreciate your support as we work to provide reliable and robust information technology systems for MCLA.

-Mark Berman