Extended Sakai Help Hours

I am pleased to announce that we are expanding the amount of Sakai support we are able to offer, beginning this fall semester. During these hours, we will provide first and second level support via email and phone.

Sakai support contact info:

sakai@rutgers.edu
732.445.8721

Sakai support hours:

Normal Fall Schedule (Aug 31 - Dec 11, excluding Labor Day weekend)

• Mon-Thurs 8:30AM-10:00PM
• Fri 8:30AM-6:00PM
• Sun 4:00PM-8:00PM

The week before the semester (Aug 24-28) we will have partially extended hours:

• Mon-Thurs 9:00AM-8:30PM
• Fri 9:00AM-5:00PM

And we will also have extra weekend hours for the two weekends surrounding the start of the semester with 11-3 phone coverage and email coverage throughout the day:

• Sat, 8/29
• Sun, 8/30
• Sat, 9/5
• Sun, 9/6
• Mon, 9/7 (Labor Day)

The weeks of Thanksgiving and Finals will also have adjusted hours, which will be announced in November and December.

With these new hours and added phone support, we hope to better provide the assistance you need, when you need it. And, as always, we welcome your feedback and comments.

Sakai Downtimes

You may have noticed that Sakai has been unavailable about once a week for two hours early in the morning during the last month. These maintainance “downtimes,” which will continue until classes begin, are giving us a chance to upgrade Sakai in anticipation of an increase in activity during the upcoming school year.

For those interested in more details, we're in the middle of three general projects which are requiring downtimes:

Sakai Updates - At the beginning of the summer, we upgraded to Sakai 2.6. This upgrade included significant changes across many different Sakai tools. In addition, we have also added a few extra features, at the request of faculty and staff at Rutgers. Every time we want to implement some updates, we need to take Sakai down for an hour or so. We do this early in the morning so as to inconvenience the fewest number of people.

Hardware Updates - Sakai is run on many different machines. These machines require upgrades and regular maintenance. This summer, we are upgrading our databases and installing some new hardware that will improve Sakai's performance.

ePortfolio Development - We've been working with a few groups at Rutgers to develop ePortfolios for student reflection and assessment. These systems need to be tested by the organizations that will be using them, and changes implemented immediately to allow further testing.

Right now, our anticipated downtimes until Sept 1 are as follows:

Tues, Aug 11
Sat, Aug 15
Sat, Aug 22
Tues, Aug 25 (this may be moved up to Tues, Aug 18 if possible)

Once the semester begins, we anticipate monthly downtimes that will last about an hour. We will take Sakai down as few times during the semester as possible, and will work hard to minimize the impact on the faculty, students, and staff who rely upon the system.

Our end goal is to make Sakai as reliable and useful as possible. We anticipate having almost 20,000 unique users log into Sakai every day come Fall semester, and so this is important to us now more than ever.

If you have any questions or comments on any of this, please either comment here or send us an email at sakai@rutgers.edu. As always, we thank you for your understanding.