Though these windows are scheduled weekly, outages are performed only as absolutely required, and the length of the outage will vary. If there is no maintenance scheduled for a system, during the maintenance window, then the system is available.

This maintenance window is mainly for systems that have a large impact on employees and students, like Banner, Blackboard (WebCT), myDouglas etc.

CEIT will continue to coordinate with various functional areas to maintain maximum availability during critical periods, and no maintenance will be scheduled during these periods.

Guidelines

1. CEIT will, as much as possible, conduct scheduled maintenance during the established windows.
2. CEIT will publish outages, where possible a week ahead, on myDouglas login page regarding work to be done during established window but will not send e-mails.  The exception to this will be if the outage is for over 2 hrs.  In this case there will be additional communications.

Maintenance Objectives or Scope

1. To apply Vendor delivered patches that fix bugs or security defects.
2. To upgrade the application to a more current version; this enables us to be current with technology and also supported by the vendor.
3. Computer systems are often very integrated and in order to apply an enhancement, sometimes the system may need to be shutdown and started up.

Maintenance Rationale

1. To strike a balance between high availability and routine maintenance.
2. To make it easier for people to schedule their work around maintenance windows and avoid over communication.
3. To avoid surprises when some systems are offline.
4. To make planning easier for those made responsible for keeping the systems up.