NILE will be down for scheduled maintenance. Between the 28 December and 29 December you will be unable to login to NILE to access resources or submit any assessments online. Other University systems should not be impacted by this work. [Detailed information about the nature of the maintenance is shown at the bottom of this posting.]
If you were planning on making use of the Christmas vacation to get a lot of work done that involves NILE, please make sure that you log-in and download any resources that you need before Saturday 28 December.
Students – If you are due to submit assignments during this time, please be assured that your deadline will be extended to reflect this downtime. Please check with your Module Leader for more information relating to assignment deadlines.
If you have any questions about the NILE downtime, please contact Rob Howe, by emailing rob.howe@northampton.ac.uk
Detailed information on the nature of the maintenance.
Blackboard is currently hosted with Managed hosting in Amsterdam. As part of updating contracts, there is a move of the physical hosting from Amsterdam to Amazon Webservices (AWS) in Frankfurt. There will be a full data migration from Saturday 28 December and then the NILE service will continue to be unavailable until Sunday 29 December for quality checks and to allow web services redirections to take place. This blog will be updated if there are any changes to timescales.
The key benefits of this move will be:
- Updating of all patches and fixes since August 2019.
- Higher uptime (99.99%).
- Continuous release which means less time needed for downtime during the year.
- Quicker implementation of patches (Currently we have to take the service down to implement any patch or fix).
- Features implemented quicker (Currently we only schedule major feature implementation once a year).
- Ability to stage move to Blackboard Ultra – the latest release of Blackboard – with higher levels of accessibility and usability.
