The Curative Analysis team in IT is tasked with finding the causes of significant IT issues that affect campus. In this news update, we draw your attention to some of the problems being investigated or issues handled recently.

Student Release of InformationRecently, some WCU students were unable to enter or change their security code for the Student Release of Information.  In some cases, the student was directed to a faculty version of the page instead of the student version.  To prevent the issue from occurring in the future, IT analysts updated the application code and the links within myWCU to direct students to the correct page.

Vehicle RegistrationWe began receiving reports that several students were experiencing issues when trying to register a vehicle from the Vehicle Registration application.  Further investigation revealed a timing and process issue causing the student sessions to timeout.  A new process was created and tested to prevent this issue from happening again.  The new process added a refresh on each page to keep the session alive and extended the timeout setting for vehicle registration.

Blackboard Course Copy and Course Merge:  During the first summer session, some WCU instructors were unable to access merged courses, and IT Help Desk staff were unable to perform course copy requests in Blackboard.  As a workaround, course copy requests were temporarily redirected to the LMS team.  The Blackboard Learn Q4 2016 service pack with Cumulative Update 4 was installed on Saturday, July 22, 2017 which resolved the issues.

RightFax ServerWe discovered that some outbound faxes sent with the new faxing system were failing or taking a very long time to fax to certain destinations.  Working with Mitel Communications, IT analysts made a change to the protocol for outbound faxes which reduced the time required for sending faxes to external fax numbers, eliminating the problem.

July 2017
Problem Tickets: (Total 6)

Student Release of Information application: 1
myWCU: 1
Mercury storage share (H: drive):  1
Blackboard:  1
HHS hardware failures :  1
Wired network connections in Belk: 1

The Division of IT is committed to adopting a proactive, process-oriented approach to prevent problems before they arise. We will continue to keep you informed on our progress.