Arbor's Maintenance Windows

[FragglePete]

Need to rant; let off steam a bit.  As much as we love Arbor, their recent maintenance windows have been happening from 8pm in the evenings, some later, but in the last week, two have started from 8pm.   This is the time when a lot of students are trying to access and submit assigments, and parents are trying to check balances, child's homework, etc.  As a result, our inbox is filling up with irate parents about Arbor logging them out, not being able to access the platform, etc and students visiting our office this morning saying they can't access Arbor as it's forgotten their password!

 

Our morning is now spent dealing with parent's responses and dealing with students over this.

 

Pete

 

 

[sjatkn]

Same here. It's not been a great start as we have had problems with student and parents not getting the password reset emails they need to get their accounts going. So our parents are already a little grumpy about having had to move to a new system. I don't think they have seen the benefits yet.

 

I am going to put a feature request into Arbor to ask them make the app/website report that there is maintenance occurring and that it is unavailable. It may reduce the number of "why's it not working" emails that are received.

[mullet_man]

Yeah same, had lots of students trying to access via the app which wasn't saying anything about maintenance I believe so we had lots of students thinking their passwords were wrong.

 

As much as it's an inconvenience  it's better it's down at 8pm than 8am so looking at the positives! 

[Sylv3r]

This has also been raised as an issue in one of our schools (possibly where the parents are the most vocal).

 

I agree that downtime is important and needs to happen, but i think we received the notification of the planned downtime around 4pm that later that evening at 8pm the sites will be put into maintenance mode so we couldn't really proactively inform parents and students of the planned downtime.

 

As has also been pointed out above - even something obvious on the app to say the site is down for maintenance would be better than an error to say you can't logon at this time and then everybody attempting to reset passwords etc.