by Victoria Clarke
One of the benefits of using a hosted solution like ours is that you don’t need to worry about any costly updates or maintenance of the system – it’s our job to take care of all of that. Not only do we work continuously to develop our technology to include new features of benefit to our learners (such as the improved discussion forums and new functionality for submitting and marking distance learning assignments) but we obviously need to make sure that the technology that drives all of this is working in tip-top condition.
You may have heard mention over the last couple of months about some upgrade work that we’ve been doing. For the technically-minded amongst you we’ve upgraded the back-end database from Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (32-bit), running on a Microsoft Windows Server 2000 (32-bit) server, to SQL Server 2008 (64-bit) on a Windows Server 2008 (64-bit) server (phew!). For those of you who’s eyes may have just glazed over (and there’s a few of us here in the office – just don’t tell Tony!) that means that our technology is fully up-to-date.
Server migration is a tricky business. All manner of things could go wrong which is why we’ve all kept our heads down, crossed our fingers and left our technical team to it. The good news is that the migration went well and that there have been no problems reported. The even better news is that it makes Imago, our technology, even better! Short-term benefits that you may have noticed include:
• We can now handle more data and more learners concurrently, and faster
• Faster, more stable fileserver hardware with much greater capacity
• System performance will continue to remain good when carrying out overnight back-ups and housekeeping routines (particularly relevant to our overseas learners and those of you partial to doing a spot of online learning at 3am)
• Complex reports will compile more swiftly
• Greater resistance to pesky hacker attacks
And, in the long term, this upgrade will mean that we can:
• House up to 20 times more data than before
• Accelerate some of our development work
• Make some code changes that will result in faster content searching
• Speed up reports
• And, generally ensure that our partners and learners continue to receive the excellent service that they have become used to!
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