What happened to WebAdvisor? Crash explained

You might have noticed that Labor Day weekend WebAdvisor was down. You may have also noticed it remained inactive for a little over two weeks. What happened during this crucial time?

Harold Barnes, the head of IT Department at IVCC was more than willing to explain the issue.

Barnes explained that for two years now there has been a project under way to move the college’s information and programs onto a new database, WebAdvisor included. The college understood they would need at least three days to shut down the program in order to take all necessary precautions to make the transition as smooth as possible; however, no one could have predicted what was to come.

The vendor the college was working with during this time made three key mistakes that would keep WebAdvisor down for 17 days, according to the college.

When mishaps happen, the IT department at IV is usually on hand to provide “patches” to fix the problems. Barnes noted that these patches go through a lot of testing, nearly two months, until they are thrown into the live accounts for the public. When the mishaps with WebAdvisor occurred, the vendor immediately took it upon themselves to patch the processes immediately in the live account. A problem that had already been going on for nearly 10 days, would now be stretched about a week longer as the IVCC IT department worked at any provided moment to fix the ongoing problems.

“IVCC is very lucky to have the IT staff we do,” Barnes said, stating that it is the right amount of people to get what needs to be done, done. The problems with WebAdvisor, however, were thrown upon the department so quickly there was little time to prepare. Whenever a member of the IT department had the time they were running tests and trying to take care of the crucial systems that were corrupted for the staff and students of IVCC. Nothing to this extent has ever happened before, so the IT department at IV worked rigorously to restore WebAdvisor for the students and staff who needed it so critically.

The biggest thing Barnes wants to note is an apology to the many students and departments that suffered those 17 days. The IT department understands the stress that was put on people with the lack of WebAdvisor.

Barnes has written a list to the vendor and described all the effects the WebAdvisor crash had on IVCC. The vendor is working with IVCC to make sure things are taken care of as efficiently as possible.

While glitches occur within the world every day, no one was prepared for 17 days without WebAdvisor. Now that everything is being restored and set back to normal, each and every one of us at IVCC can now say, “We survived the WebAdvisor crash of 2014.”