UPDATE: This planned maintenance was postponed from Wednesday 13 June.
We plan to make some changes on Thursday morning that will require our technical team to take Online Surveys offline for a period between 08:00 – 09:00 BST.
This means that Online Surveys will not be accessible by users or respondents. A maintenance message will be displayed while the application is offline.
Our technical team has built in some contingency time to ensure the work is completed within this window.
Why is Online Surveys being taken offline?
Since Online Surveys has moved to Jisc, we have concentrated on ensuring we can offer the same level of service, or better, than its previous owners. This has meant a lot of work behind the scenes that our users will be unaware of. We are now reaching the end of that period, and our developers can now concentrate on looking at new features and enhancements.
Most of the time, we will be able to implement new features and enhancements without users noticing. But, sometimes, it is necessary to make changes to our database to facilitate these. Where this is the case, our technical team may need to take Online Surveys offline for a short time.
The reason for this is simple. Our main priority is to ensure that your survey response data is never vulnerable, so we take a no-risk approach when these kinds of changes are made. By taking the application offline, we can back up your data beforehand, and ensure that no responses submitted during the work are lost.
When it is necessary to take Online Surveys offline, we try to minimise any impact by doing this out of UK business hours. But, of course, we recognise the inconvenience that any period of downtime can cause.
What changes are being made?
Some of the changes being made are to help our support and technical teams better serve our users, but there will be some enhancements for users that we will highlight via our blog on Thursday.
This is an exciting time for Online Surveys. If you would like to join our community to suggest new features and enhancements, please sign up to our Community mailing list here.
If you have any questions, please contact Online Surveys Support at help@jisc.ac.uk