Carmen is Feeling Sprightly Again

You may have noticed that Carmen is responding a little more quickly than she has since Winter quarter started. And you would be correct. For the first time in well over a month, Carmen is no longer “yellow” on the OCIO system status page. And we – my colleagues on the Carmen team – are SOOO glad!

The annual Carmen update in late December took an unexpected turn; our system was updated to a version that was slightly newer than what we were prepared for. The difference wasn’t much (we were updated to 9.4.1 rather than 9.4.0), but it was enough to make a difference. And unfortunately, the update process was such that we couldn’t “roll back” to a previous version without incurring a different set of problems.

The update included some new features (Notifications) that tied into older features in ways that we hadn’t tested on our hardware. As you might expect, computer code that works fine in a smaller environment does not always work so well in a system as large as Ohio State.

We’ve spent the last month or so fine-tuning our settings and nursing our databases and hardware to maintain the very best performance possible. We turned off the new features and replaced a widget on the homepage of Carmen courses to reduce the impact of the changes. Meanwhile, staff at Desire2Learn worked to identify and revise exactly which bits of code were causing the problems.

And they tested the new code. And then we tested the code. And they revised it. And we all tested it again. It took several iterations to find everything.

This past Sunday, OCIO and D2L staff installed the new code. The improvement was dramatic! We have restored the Updates widget to the course homepages. We have begun testing the Notifications feature in our testing environment. We hope to be able to turn that on again next week.

We sympathize with the frustration you have experienced with Carmen this past month and appreciate your patience.