WAOL Blog

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.

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)

Where2Go4ANGELSupport

Audience: All ANGEL users

What: WAOL ANGEL was offline for about 2 hours this morning due to a power loss at ANGEL hosting.  WAOL ANGEL is back up now.

The ANGEL datacenter lost power early this morning.
Tacoma elearning staff put in a ticket at 7:16 am.

• Some network gear at ANGEL blew while ANGEL was switching to back up power.
• The gear was replaced and full connectivity restored by 8:46 PST.
• This outage was caused by a power loss, and affected all ANGEL hosted customers; it is not related to the
• Service Pack applied to WAOL ANGEL last night.

Thanks to Tacoma and other colleges that reported the system down in the ANGEL Support Portal and Presidium.

Here’s the full report from ANGEL Managed Hosting:

Today our datacenter experienced a power outage which caused our network to fail over to fault tolerant devices.  Shortly after this failover, the environment had a power surge which physically damaged several networks switches.  As the other fault tolerant devices were without power and the fail over devices were damaged, we were not able to recover quickly.  We dispatched engineers to our datacenter and switched out the damaged devices as soon as possible to bring sites back up.   We sincerely apologize for the outage.  We are currently work with our data center to determine what happened to cause to power issues and to ensure an event like this cannot happen again. 
Thanks,
Mark Thompson
Managed Hosting

ANGEL hosting will apply Service Pack 5—January Update to WAOL  ANGEL on Friday morning, February 12,  during our regular maintenance period between 2:00 and 5:00 am.

• We do not anticipate any interruptions in service except during the maintenance time.
• This Service Pack will fix the No Name instructor issue we saw at the start of Winter quarter.

After this Service Pack is applied, announcements over 8000 characters will not be saved.  Please note that is 8000 characters, not words.  Pasting even a short announcement in from a Word doc can result in a very large number of characters since Word brings in formatting. 

Thanks,
Connie

Angel’s “What’s New” function has been turned off due to performance issues.  The “What’s New” function was what caused alerts/icons for new items/tasks to show up under your class listing on the home page.  You can still access these features from within your classes:

• In the class, expand the Guide, then click on the “What’s New” or “Tasks” tabs.
• Click on the plus sign to expand the categories.
• Note that under Tasks, the categories may indicate zero (0) items when they actually exist.  Expand the categories to see.
• Click here for a video created by Jerry Lewis of Columbia Basin on how to do this.

We are working with Blackboard to determine the problem and reactivate “What’s New,” however, in the mean-time, please use the workaround.

Audience: ELC, Faculty and ITC

Update: ANGEL successfully disabled “What’s New” again last night, and they report improved performance of WAOL ANGEL. 

 WAOL staff will meet with ANGEL this morning to discuss how to configure What’s New so we can turn it on again.

If you get reports of slowness, please update the ticket with detailed information.  Ticket # #596-8313119.

It is worth re-mentioning that new faculty WAOL accounts remain inactive until the faculty login to waol.org with their ANGEL login credentials; this initial login activates the new account.

And remember, brand new faculty (with no accounts at all) get their accounts by using the Account Self-Registration tool.

WAOL ANGEL will be offline starting 03:01 am on Dec. 16th for up to 24 hours due to a scheduled upgrade to version 7.4. You will not be able to access ANGEL during this time.

Last Friday (December 11th), the State board’s email system was down. This Monday our service was back up but in the process some of last week’s email was lost. If you were expecting to hear back from us or had trouble contacting us by email during that time it’s likely we lost the communication.

We apologize. Please feel free to resend us anything you think we may have missed.

Main topics covered:  SLA documentation, 7.4 Upgrade

Where to find these in the recording:

• 00:01:30   Updates
• 00:01:50   SBCTC email—down last weekend; ok now
• 00:03:35   SLA Complete- Cable
• 00:22:30   ANGEL 7.4 Upgrade -Wednesday 3:00 am PST
• 00:29:00   Take-aways

Click here for access to a list of all Advisory Group meeting recordings and slideshows.