Thought this would be useful to pass on about Friday 8th of May

Email:

From: Vicki Gardner
Sent: 05 May 2009 16:01
Subject: Advance Notification of Work on SWGfL Services - Friday 8th May 2009
Importance: High

Dear all,
First the good news, then the slightly not so good news
Upgrading is part of what we do. In fact it is a major part of what we do.
Every week, every month, every year, IT develops, systems do more, and you want your school computers to be faster, better and more capable.

Generating this faster and better world is what we both want – and as part of this over the next few months we are upgrading the broadband networks in Cornwall, Devon, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire. (Other areas will follow – it is just that everything has to be done in an order, and these are the counties we’ve started the broadband upgrade on).
To make the broadband upgrades work first time, we need to get the equipment in the data centre (the behind the scenes stuff) ready beforehand. Most of the services in the data centre will be completely unaffected and you shouldn’t notice anything.

However, there may be slight disruptions to all SWGfL services, no longer than 30 seconds at a time, and it is just possible that there will be one or two subsequent issues – such as your website being unavailable or a remote log-in session not working for you.

We are going to carry out this work on Friday the 8th of May, starting at 4pm and it will take much of the weekend to complete, with normal service resuming on Sunday evening.
I know that is phenomenally annoying – we are working to a tried and tested plan of work and we do have roll-back plans if things go wrong. If I could guarantee no side-effects of our upgrade and testing I would do it – but it simply isn’t possible.

Kind regards,
Vicki Gardner
SWGfL Managed Service Manager

Ta,

I must have missed the mass email that was sent to everyone. :)

Thanks for letting us know - at least I'll be able to give a reason if staff contact me (and yes, they do contact me out of hours) about the email/intranet/website not working.

HBJB