Central IT
12/19/08 PRISM Communication
Soft Freeze Reminder
The PRISM Team wants to ensure that the upgrade goes as smooth as possible and often new changes to code or enhancements to an application can produce undesired effects when working through an upgrade. As a result, a change freeze for the PRISM 8.9 Production Environment will be in effect as of December 30, 2008. Any requests by campuses for modifications to the current version of PRISM or feature enhancements to the application will be placed on hold until after the upgrade is performed. This will ensure that whatever code is currently in production will be included in the upgrade and lower the risk of potential issues. Only patches and fixes will be applied to PRISM 8.9 production during this time.
Phased Approach
One of the goals of the project is to minimize the amount of time required to perform the actual upgrade. To reduce the amount of time, the PRISM Team will be "practicing" upgrades in the Development and Training Environments over the next eight (8) months and refining the steps required for the actual upgrade. These repeated "upgrades" will help ensure all the "kinks are worked out" before the production system is upgraded.
Production Implementation Schedule
The PRISM Team is estimating that the actual PRISM upgrade will take approximately ten (10) days. As the upgrade moves forward, a copy of the production data will be made available in "read-only" format so campuses can perform certain functions. The PRISM Team will also be working with a Pilot Group of Campus Users to test the version for functionality and the interfaces with critical systems. The final "go live" date will be July 6, 2009.
Tentative Implementation Schedule:
| June 26, 2009 |
• Production systems unavailable at 5:00pm • Production data is copied • Read-only data available to campuses |
| July 2, 2009 | PRISM 9.0 available for pilot group testing |
| July 6, 2009 | PRISM 9.0 available for all users |
1/21/09 PRISM Communication
New Test Server for PRISM 8.9
FASTAR, the vendor that maintains the server infrastructure for PRISM, will be installing a new web server in the PRISM 8.9 Test environment from 5:00pm – 6:00pm Wednesday, January 21, 2009. The outage will impact a number of environments used for development and testing including UWC89DMO, UWC89DEV and UWC89TRN. There should be no impact on the production environment.
Scheduled Maintenance
On Sunday, January 25, 2009 from 6:30am – 7:30am, both the PRISM 8.9 and PRISM 9.0 environments will not be available due to scheduled maintenance. The vendor will be performing system patches on a number of servers. A notice has been placed on the PRISM Login page.
Practice Upgrade
The PRISM Team is in the process of performing an upgrade pass in a test environment. Each “pass” allows the PRISM Team to practice the steps required to upgrade the system to PRISM 9.0 including the implementation of the new system and the conversion of data. Each pass also helps identify potential issues and problems that may arise during the actual upgrade. The PRISM Team has documented a number of issues and is working with PeopleSoft to identify solutions.