Check Your Gradebook Categories!

Attention Secondary Teachers. Please check each of your gradebooks to ensure your categories/percentages are set up properly. If they are not, it will cause your gradebook to not calculate properly which will lead to additional problems as we go through the semester.

Since the first progress report period of the semester has closed, the category screens are locked on all gradebooks so you won't be able to make these changes directly. If you notice a problem with any categories or percentages in your gradebook, please contact Skyward Help at x2248 or skywardhelp@springbranchisd.com.

Message From Venu: Friday Maintenance Window

We have 450 computer servers at SBISD serving 40,000 users (35,500 students plus 4,500 staff). Our wired and wireless data network connects these servers to our computers – desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc. The data network makes it possible to access several hundred different programs we collectively use across the district. The network provides access to the Internet and provides content filtering (for our kids) and firewall protection (for viruses and malicious hacking).

To maintain this extensive infrastructure takes time and effort. Computer software goes through periodic updates to fix problems, introduce new features and stay current. Updating takes time and while the update is taking place, the computer or software is not available for use. I’m sure you’ve experienced this with your smartphone. With this many servers and programs something is always being updated – to fix problems, to apply security patches, to upgrade to a new version.

Instead of scheduling each upgrade individually, we accumulate all the updates for the week and do them all on Friday evenings. That’s the time most of us are taking a breather from work. This is our “maintenance window”. It is from 6:00 PM Friday to 6:00 AM Saturday. During this weekly Friday “maintenance window” which system goes down depends on what maintenance we are doing that week. If we are upgrading a major network component, everything will go down. If we are upgrading one application, just that application will go down. Please do remember the program you are trying to access may be down Friday evening. You will not see a warning. If it is being updated, it will just go down abruptly.

By instituting the concept of a “maintenance window”, updates become a routine thing. We don’t have to “schedule” each upgrade with all the affected users. And, you don’t see a bunch of emails about various systems going down at various times for maintenance.

To summarize, any computer system may go down on any Friday after 6:00 PM without warning. (During football season, we postpone email, network and Internet upgrades to after 10:00 PM.)

...Venu