Archive for February 25, 2010
What’s New/Task Hot Fix Install and Rollout Plan
Audience: All faculty, students and staff
What’s New/Task Hot Fix is now available in all domains in WAOL ANGEL.
Here’s the documentation that you can send to your faculty and students who use WAOL ANGEL (Changes to What New-Tasks)
WAOL staff rolled out the Hot Fix domain-by-domain over the last two weeks to make sure we did not see a degradation in performance as the function was restored. So far we have not seen any related technical problems.
If you do see any problems, however, please have your college domain administrator add information to this ANGEL support ticket: #596-8313119
Background: When WAOL ANGEL experienced performance problems in January, ANGEL suggested we turn off the What’s New/Tasks feature since this feature was programmed to search every classroom or group for changes every time a user logs in. We turned it off, and performance improved. The cost, however, was high in that faculty and students lost very useful tools. We asked ANGEL to provide What’s New/Tasks in a form that would work for our installation, and they did so by changing the What’s New/Tasks tool so it works on demand rather than running continuously.
We are sorry that this function was not available to faculty and students for several weeks this quarter, and we are glad that we now have all functions back.
Thanks for your patience and assistance as we worked toward this solution.
Support graphic for WAOL ANGEL
We’ve heard that there is some confusion about what the WAOL ANGEL collaborative tech support process looks like. So we’ve put together a graphic that we hope makes it more clear. Click the link below to view the graphic (which is also available under “Useful Links” in the sidebar)
ANGEL Secure Logon
Audience: All ANGEL users
UPDATE: ANGEL users using Internet Explorer may have experienced problems with the secure logon nugget, starting from 6pm Thursday night. A fix was applied at 8am Friday morning.
What: We’re phasing in a secure logon technology for ANGEL. It’s currently appearing on the ANGEL logon page as an additional control. Our plan is to evaluate it for a few days, and after a successful trial, remove the standard logon control. During this evaluation period both logon controls will appear on the ANGEL logon page.
This information is available from the More Info link on the control:
- Secure logon protects your ANGEL username and password from interception while logging in,
even if you are using an unsecured Wi-Fi network, such as is commonly available at coffee shops. To accomplish this, your account is first transmitted via a secure (SSL) connection and a one-time login token value is returned. Finally, this token is sent directly to ANGEL and you are logged in. All of this occurs without sending your account in clear text over the Internet.
Note that the ANGEL logon page itself is not SSL-secured; only the logon transaction uses SSL and so you will not see the secure site indicator in your browser.
