November 29, 2007 : Major Colleague Release Upgrade
As many of you may already know, over the last 18 months, members of the IT staff along with several other members of the Juilliard staff have been working hard on a major upgrade of our Colleague system, from Release 17 to Release 18. Colleague is our Student Information and Institution Management system. It is used to manage numerous aspects of our operations here at Juilliard.

The final migration to the new release is scheduled to take place over the weekend of November 30th. Starting at 6pm on Thursday November 29th, the Colleague system will be brought down. It will not be available again until 10am on Monday December 3rd. At that point, we will be on the new, upgraded version.

During the upgrade, a number of systems will be unavailable. These include WebAdvisor and Informer. Students will be unable to check their Account Statements, Financial Aid, Grades and Class Schedules. Staff members will amongst other things, not be able to access the Absence Tracking tool. Other operations including Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable will also be impacted, especially on Friday November 30th., as the systems they run on will be unavailable. Please plan around this.

We apologize for the inconvenience, but it should be more than offset by the numerous advantages of the upgrade. Please contact Jason Nicholas or myself if you have any questions.

October 8, 2007 : Network Issue on 10/7
Beginning around 7:15 am Sunday, there was a malfunction in one of the older devices in the main-line connection to the internet - specifically the 'lightspeed' device, which attempts to prevent purient content from being displayed on public machines.  It took us a while to isolate the problem since the system was reporting itself as normal, but we repaired the problem as of 11:45am yesterday.  To further ensure stability on that device, i've instituted an automatic reboot of the device every week.  That should prevent the kind half-freeze that prevented traffic from flowing without our being informed the system was down.