Digication Apology and Next Steps

Dear Digication User Community,

As the new semester gets settled, we have had some time to diagnose and would like to provide some additional information about the problems that some of our schools encountered at the end of last semester. 

First of all, please let us give you our most sincere apologies. We are deeply sorry and saddened by the disruption some of our users experienced at the end of last year. Many members of the Digication team have a history in school administration and as educators. We know how frustrating, confusing, and disappointing technology problems are, especially at the end of the semester. Our entire team was absolutely devastated to have negatively impacted your semester. We are working hard on multiple technology, process, and communications improvements. 

We thought it would be helpful to provide you with a quick summary: Between 11/24/2011 and 12/09/2011, some of our user community experienced serious display issues in their Digication e-Portfolios as a result of problems that occurred during what should have been a routine server upgrade. These issues were serious in themselves and were compounded for our users by occurring towards the end of the semester. 

We learned many important lessons through this unfortunate event. We now realize that this type of upgrade, although routine, can put our community at significant risk. We will never plan an upgrade of this nature again so close to the end of a semester. We also realized that not all system administrators were notified about the scheduled maintenance windows via email. From now on, all administrators will be provided advance notice of the date and time such upgrades will take place. 

This technology problem was the biggest crisis Digication has had to face in its ten-year history. The event has triggered many internal discussions at Digication and important discussions with our end-user community.  We have completed a full audit of our technology and made many changes in our development, maintenance, and technology update processes to safeguard against these or other technological failures in the future.

We have received invaluable feedback from end-users and administrators about necessary changes to our communication with the community.  We have started implementing new processes and policies in response to this feedback. Administrators will receive additional updates regarding these changes but here’s an overview:

• Advance notice by direct email to Administrators as well as posting to our online support desk (http://support.digication.com) about scheduled maintenance, updates, and new feature development plans.  
• Better on-screen notifications to end-users.  (Development of this feature is in progress.)
• The ability for our Administrators to easily edit on-screen notifications for the end-users at their institutions. (Development of this feature is in progress.)
• The creation of a more active, accessible, and useful Help Desk with user forums. (The forums are available in the Help Desk Knowledge Base: https://support.digication.com/forums. Many new forums are now available with resources and answers to FAQs. We encourage you to subscribe to these forums to receive updates when new articles are added.)
• Ability to search and browse all Digication help materials and contact Digication support  in a single location through our online help desk by merging Digication Help with the online Help Desk. (Available now at http://support.digication.com)
• Ability to login to Help Desk to review ticket status without creating a separate help desk account. (Development of this feature is in progress.)
• New Feature Request forum where the community can post feature requests, comment, vote and see what features are planned and what features are done. (Available now here:https://support.digication.com/forums/127825-feature-requests)