e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Scriba

  • Vert Capital and Scriba Corp: Institutions losing course data in company’s death throes

    Vert Capital and Scriba Corp: Institutions losing course data in company’s death throes

    After last year’s disastrous outage at UC Davis due to Scriba Corp’s change of data center for the Sakai LMS (branded as SmartSite at UC Davis), it turns out that there is more damage to be done as the company slowly disappears. What appears to have happened in the past few months is that Scriba has not been paying this new data center provider (IO Data Centers), and that company is withholding the data on its servers until the issue is resolved. The end result is that several remaining Scriba customers have lost not just a live Sakai site but also the underlying current and historic course data. In at least one case, this dispute has caused a distance education program to be halted until the school figures out how to set up a new LMS site and to recreate their course content.

    Based on two people familiar with Scriba’s recent operations, despite several remaining schools continuing to pay hosting fees, Scriba was not fully paying IO Data Centers. While I have no information on whether there was a legitimate complaint or whether this was simply non-payment to save cash while Scriba died, I will point out that last Spring Scriba’s contract with the Apereo Foundation to remain a commercial affiliate was cancelled under similar circumstances. Scriba simply stopped paying Apereo until the foundation’s board voted to terminate their contract. (more…)

  • UC Davis Lessons: Open is as open does

    It’s interesting how one phrase can cause such a reaction.

    There is an interesting angle here in that Sakai is open source yet data is not easily recoverable.

    This comment came from the original post discussing UC Davis’ SmartSite disaster when their Sakai hosting partner Scriba botched a data center move, leading to a university of 32,000+ students going without a fully-functional LMS for the last three weeks of a term, including finals week. If you want the full run-down, read that linked post then look at additional posts in this list for the basics. ((SmartSite is the UC Davis branding for their LMS, which was hosted at the time by Scriba, a Sakai Commercial Affiliate.))

    What did I mean with this comment?

    Simply that this outage would give us a chance in reality to get a better understanding of the dynamics of open source solutions and whether the university in question would actually have achieved the ability to “control its destiny”. The early indications at the time were that UC Davis would not be able to make the course data from their LMS fully available to faculty and students before the end of the term. A full analysis of the causes and implications of the situation needed more information on what led to the outage, what UC Davis had in their contract with Scriba, and how the end of the term would play out. But even before that analysis, the comment was also based on the likely market perceptions.

    What did I not mean? (more…)

  • LMS Outage: Exclusive view of UC Davis contract with Scriba

    When I first heard about the recent LMS outage at UC Davis – which left the school with no LMS access for a full week and without a fully functional LMS through the remainder of the spring term – it was quite clear that this was an unusual situation. There have been plenty of other LMS outages, but with this one not only did UC Davis lose days of system access, during the outage they had no idea if and when the system would be restored. Any useful communication with the vendor ceased, and the school had to scramble and invent their own disaster recovery on the fly.

    What we didn’t know at the time was whether UC Davis staff had planned for such a contingency and had reasonable controls in place. Thanks to the media relations and IT teams at UC Davis, we at e-Literate now have the contract with Scriba to help answer these questions. I have also talked to Ian Dolphin, executive director at the Apereo Foundation that runs the Sakai project, and Michael Sanders, CEO of Scriba, to gather and verify the data in this post.

    In a nutshell, this was a screwup of colossal proportions by Scriba and Scriba alone. Furthermore, Scriba is no longer a Sakai Commercial Affiliate. (more…)

  • SmartSite Goes Dumb: A student’s view of the UC Davis LMS outage

    [ed. Cydney Jones is a junior at UC Davis, and she was kind enough to share information and insights during my coverage of the UC Davis LMS outage (their Sakai-based LMS is branded as SmartSite and hosted by Scriba). I asked her if she could write a post giving a student’s inside view of the situation. You can follow Cydney on Twitter at @crabbyCyd.]

    By: Cydney Jones

    UC Davis’ SmartSite, the learning management system we love to hate, earned that hate when it went missing two weeks before the end of the Spring quarter. As used and abused by students and faculty, SmartSite is accessed constantly. Need to read new class materials, log into SmartSite. Want to learn about assignments and turn them in, access SmartSite. Curious about your grade, look it up on SmartSite. Accessible from anywhere, on campus or off, via smartphone or computer terminal, SmartSite was the glue that held most courses together.

    It seemed odd that something so integral to every class and course would need to go down for maintenance in the middle of the term for more than two and a half days. But, the UCD IT department shared their communication from our LMS’s host, Scriba, saying that the system had suffered “failures in our primary data center.” It seemed odd that we were only give a day’s notice. We should have been more prepared, students, faculty, and administration alike. (more…)

  • Update on UC Davis LMS Fiasco: Finishing the term with two partial systems

    After the LMS outage that started May 20th – covered here, here, and here at e-Literate – UC Davis has finished its spring academic term as of June 9th using two partial systems, one for faculty and one for students and neither of which is fully functional. In other words, UC Davis never fully recovered its LMS (Sakai system branded as SmartSite) functionality from the outage. UC Davis staff have indicated they will provide more information to us by interviews and public records, but they have not said when they will be ready to talk. Scriba (the Sakai commercial affiliate and hosting provider that caused the outage) has not replied to requests for an interview or statement. When and if these occur, I’ll post updates.

    For a short timeline:

    • May 19th: Scriba notifies UC Davis of an emergency maintenance planned for May 20 – 23 as they changed data centers. Regarding the data center move, CEO Michael Sanders stated “The failures are as of a result of a third party and are outside of our control.” (irony alert inserted here)

      • (more…)

  • UC Davis, Sakai, and Open Source

    Phil has been a busy boy, putting out two pieces about some Blackboard research that had gotten some negative responses and two more on a horrifically bad LMS outage for UC Davis and other universities using support vendor Scriba.

    Our main schtick here at e-Literate is to get beyond the headlines. We try to explain what is actually happening and why it is important. Often, this involves puncturing hype like “robot tutors in the sky,” not by heaping them with scorn but by showing the gap between the hype and reality. But there are also times when we do the same for anti-hype. For example, there is a popular narrative that Blackboard is evil and bad and stupid, partly based on the massive brand damage the company did to itself a decade ago (and two CEOs ago). As a result, when they do…well…anything, it tends to be interpreted in the worst possible light. Personally, I’m glad that Blackboard is sharing the findings of their product research. I don’t know of many ed tech companies that are doing that. This is different than putting out a white paper about some study the company did showing how awesome their product is. Rather, it shows us how they are trying to understand their customers’ needs. Sharing that back with the world helps us, in turn, understand how Blackboard thinks. It is an important kind of transparency. As Phil’s second post on the topic highlights, we do have to understand that this kind of study is different than an academic study in order to draw the right conclusions from it. But that’s fine.

    Likewise, the Scriba outage story plays into a “Sakai is dying” narrative. As it happens, I was at conference for the foundation that hosts Sakai last week and got something of a rundown on what was going on, including a preview of the release scheduled to come out this summer. (Oddly, nobody mentioned the outage, which must have been in its early stages at that point.) The Sakai sustainability story is complicated enough to merit a separate post, which I will get to later this week. In the meantime, I’d like to put the Scriba outage in context of how open source works in general and how the Sakai ecosystem works in particular. Because it is very easy for this story to reinforce preconceptions rather than looking at it carefully on its own merits.

    Phil wrote,

    There is an interesting angle here in that Sakai is open source yet data is not easily recoverable.

    Right. Open source can help with problems like the Scriba outage. As far as I can tell, it did help UC Davis. But it’s not that simple. There is a lesson to be learned here for all LMS-using schools, but it’s not “open source doesn’t provide the flexibility that it is supposed to provide”; nor is it “Sakai is dying.”

    (more…)

  • UC Davis LMS Back Online: Update on what we know about Scriba Sakai outage

    I’ve been told by two sources that the UC Davis LMS outage I described in this post may be over, and the SmartSite LMS is back online (SmartSite is UC Davis’ implementation of Sakai, hosted by Scriba). I would like to update what we know about the overall situation while we wait for additional confirmation. The following is based on my conversations with a Scriba inside source who asked to remain anonymous, a student at UC Davis, the LISTedTECH team whose database powers our new LMS subscription service, some commenters from the blog post, and a more thorough review of the UC Davis IT status site. And I should point out that UC Davis team has done an excellent job in communications – timely messages with no defensiveness, and full transparency.

    The Outage

    On Thursday, May 19, Scriba notified UC Davis and several other schools that it would perform emergency maintenance starting Friday, May 20 at 9pm PDT and ending Monday, May 23 at 11am PDT. The outage was not caused by software applications but data center issues. I’ve asked what this means, and I’ve been told that Scriba will describe the outage in the next week. (more…)