SafeAssign, the plagiarism check within Blackboard, is scheduled for maintenance directly by the Vendor. During this time, SafeAssign documents will not be processed and originality reports will not be generated. For more information about the maintenance, please see the below press release by Blackboard:
Bulletin/Advisory Information:
Updated Support Bulletin (Published March 22, 2018):
A new date has been identified for the SafeAssign - AWS migration which is now planned for April 2, 2018 starting at 3 am EDT. Planned downtime could extend through 10 am EDT. Please review the content of the original Support Bulletin listed below; all past details remain correct.
Updated Support Bulletin (Published March 7, 2018):
The planned SafeAssign migration to AWS recently announced for March 8th, and covered in this blog post last week, has been delayed. The SafeAssign Team has been preparing for this migration for around 12 months. Due to the size of the SafeAssign database, the plan for migrating data was based on an iterative approach which would limit downtime to a few hours. During the 12 months of planning both test migrations and a migration of the SafeAssign Staging environment were completed. Originally, these tests were thought to be successful, which led to our plan to complete the migration on March 8th.
When finalizing the migration activities of the SafeAssign production environment, we discovered a risk for issues regarding concurrency and data table inaccuracies, which could cause data corruption or loss for student submissions after the migration. This was not apparent during test and staging migrations and not something the team could easily correct before the March 8th migration.
Given the potential data loss and corruption we are postponing the AWS migration scheduled for March 8th until solutions for the identified problems can be resolved. We will publish a new bulletin when we have a new migration date.
We understand that our administrator partners have notified end-users of the disruption and we apologize for the last-minute postponement of the migration.
Original Support Bulletin (Published February 27, 2018):
On March 8, 2018 from approximately 3 AM EST to 9 AM EST, Blackboard will be performing scheduled maintenance on SafeAssign. During this time, the service will be unavailable to accept papers and any student submissions made during this period will not receive Originality Reports.
This maintenance window represents the final migration of SafeAssign into the cloud-based AWS infrastructure that has been planned since mid-2017 and began development in August. Over time, the SafeAssign Team has been slowly moving as many components of the service to AWS as possible while minimizing impact on end users. However the final components cannot reliably be migrated without the service experiencing some downtime. Once the service has been fully transitioned to AWS, the overall performance and stability of the service should be significantly improved going forward.
We are aware that any amount of downtime impacts your mission-critical learning environment. As such, our goals is to successfully perform the proactive SafeAssign maintenance in the least amount of time.”
Posted Mar 27, 2018 - 12:21 EDT
This scheduled maintenance affected: Student and Faculty Services (Blackboard).