Dear Members of the Franklin & Marshall Community,

I wanted to let you know that, beginning at 5PM this Friday evening (March 7, 2009), one of our on-line tools, myDiplomat, will be unavailable for use until late on Saturday afternoon (March 8, 2009). myDiplomat is used to view budget statements and academic records by our students, faculty and professional staff. All other on-line resources and systems such as webmail, email, BlackBoard, eDisk, library resources, software server, password changes and directory information in F&M People Info will be available for use during this downtime. An email will be sent once the system is back on-line and available for use.

Why are we doing this and why now?
There are two main reasons for doing this work now. First, we have planned to replace the aging servers that run our administrative databases and fiscal and academic systems (called Jenzabar) for some time and have had the new servers up and running in test mode for several months. Second, the new servers will extend our systems to include a satellite off-site secure data center that will ensure that key information systems will be up and running in the event of a major disruption of our on-campus data center.

Unfortunately the extended downtime is unavoidable, as considerable time is needed to migrate all of the data to the new servers, as well as to fully test all of the security protections. This maintenance and system upgrade should result in better performance of myDiplomat, as well as improve its reliability.

We appreciate your patience as we make these improvements and I welcome any comments or questions you may have.

Regards,
Jon Enos, CIO