UPDATE 14:55pm
All work has been successfully completed. We would, again, like to thank affected users for their patience whilst this work was carried out.
————
Between 13:00pm and 15:00pm today, (Wednesday 21 July), the SharePoint Team alongside a third party consultant will be undertaking some essential maintenance to move a small number of sp.essex.ac.uk SharePoint sites over to a new database location. The purpose of this exercise is to ensure the long-term resilience the sp.essex.ac.uk service.

Sites impacted (including all subsites below):

• https://sp.essex.ac.uk/sections/finance
• https://sp.essex.ac.uk/sections/cer
• https://sp.essex.ac.uk/projects
• https://sp.essex.ac.uk/sections/intaudit
• https://sp.essex.ac.uk/committees
• https://sp.essex.ac.uk/resources/la
• https://sp.essex.ac.uk/centres/hrc
• https://sp.essex.ac.uk/depts/sociology

The impact is a potential few minutes of downtime per site (less than 5 mins) between 13:00pm and 15:00pm. However for the duration of the maintenance, the each site will be made temporarily read-only, so site editors should be aware that changes (page edits, file uploads, file edits, etc) will not be possible in this timeframe.

We apologise for the short notice and thank you for your support during this important, and necessary, piece of work.

UPDATE 16:50pm 10 July 2021

All parts of the scheduled SharePoint maintenance are now complete, and full service is restored. No further works will be taking place today or tomorrow. We are grateful for your patience whilst this work was undertaken.

UPDATE 15:15pm 10 July 2021

The first stage of the maintenance is now complete. We are now moving on to stage 2 which should only affect the Office Web Apps Server (not the remainder of SharePoint service). However users remain advised not to use the SharePoint service at this time.

ORIGINAL POST

It is essential that we undertake some important maintenance of our SharePoint servers on the weekend of Saturday 10 and Sunday 11 July 2021.

This work will place the service at risk between 8.00am and 5.00pm on both days – during which we are advising users not to attempt to use SharePoint.

We are undertaking this work out of business hours to minimise potential disruption to users. During this time, the below services will experience extended periods of disruption or downtime:

• https://edrm.essex.ac.uk (host to: PG EAF, UG EAF, ESF, AOS, ECF & Reporting)
• https://sp.essex.ac.uk
• https://mysite.essex.ac.uk

Tools used for uploading to SharePoint and retrieving from SharePoint will also be disrupted (e.g. the Outlook AddIn) and users should not attempt to use those either.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

We will update you as soon as the work is complete.

From 4:30pm on Wednesday 9 June, we will be carrying out some necessary maintenance work on the SharePoint Service to reconfigure part of its Search Indexing Service. This is the first of a series of changes to improve the reliability of the entire SharePoint Search Service.

We are undertaking this work towards the end of business hours to minimise potential disruption to you and your teams.

During this time, the below SharePoint services may be impacted, and the search may not correctly report documents in the service:

• https://edrm.essex.ac.uk (host to: PG EAF, UG EAF, ESF, AOS, ECF & Reporting)
• https://sp.essex.ac.uk
• https://mysite.essex.ac.uk

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

UPDATE 08:53am:
This is to confirm that the scheduled work is now complete.
All SharePoint services should be fully operational.
If you or your teams experience any issues, please reboot your computer and re-try, before reporting the issue to sphelp@essex.ac.uk.
We thank users for their patience whilst this work was carried out.

—-
Between 8:00am and 9:00am on Wednesday 26 May, we will be carrying out some maintenance work on SharePoint to upgrade our security certificates.

During this time, the below websites may experience short periods of disruption or downtime:

https://edrm.essex.ac.uk (host to: PG EAF, UG EAF, ESF, AOS, ECF & Reporting)
https://sp.essex.ac.uk
https://mysite.essex.ac.uk
https://forms.essex.ac.uk

It is also possible that users of the deprecated Outlook Plugin will be disrupted briefly.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

We’ll update you here as soon as the work is complete.