We made a number of updates this week to facilitate communication of the institutions COVID-19 response. In particular, all Middfiles resource links in the Course Hub now use the URL of the Nasuni Web Access service. This allows access to the same course materials through an interface that does not require the user to be on campus or using the VPN. No action is needed on the part of faculty to update their Course Hub sites to use this, all existing Middfiles resources have been converted and newly added Middfiles resources will use Nasuni URLs.
The information that Drupal sends to the front-end caching servers to let them know what cache-able elements are present on each page is now minified. We were previously experiencing issues on page with a large number of cache-able elements where this information would exceed the size accepted by the caching servers and cause an error that preventing the page from displaying.
Issues with the Course Hub’s enrollment sync process have been resolved and we expect add / drops to arrive in the Course Hub system from Banner within a few minutes once again.
This week saw several small improvements to the Course Hub’s Canvas integration, some new office sites, and a fix to login issues on some private sites.miis.edu sites.
We have recently launched new websites for Information Technology Services, the Provost, and MiddCORE. The new ITS site includes new features like a newsroom for an office, automatic system status monitoring, calculation of ticket stats from our Web Helpdesk system, and service point hours fed from Google Calendar.
The Course Hub now has a nightly job that validates that enrollments have been passed off to downstream systems (Canvas, WordPress, O365, Panopto, etc). Incremental enrollment changes are still passed off within 15 minutes, but this nightly job will cover any rare cases where networking or system errors cause an incremental change to fail.