Welcome to a quick update from the Systems team for March 2022.
If you have any queries, contact [email protected]
There are how-to guides available for our two main areas - let us know if there are any gaps or if any articles could be improved!
Shaq!
Shaq started with us in January as our very first dedicated IT & Website Support Analyst. He has really hit the ground running - keep an eye out for him replying to su.systems queries and running around the office fixing everything.
Elections
For this elections cycle, we rebuilt the elections module from scratch (apart from the all-important vote counting algorithms). And, as you know, we got a record vote and turnout for this election!
The module itself has worked largely well, with a fresh look at the user interface for voters, a more performant live stats dashboard, and the back-end rationalised leading to some quality of life improvements for elections administrators including applying exemptions, running counts, and general management of positions and candidates.
We'll review the platform as part of the lessons learnt from the election to make further improvements, and review it yearly in advance of the leadership race.
Server issues in high traffic
During the elections we had some extremely high traffic, which is obviously great. However, this did cause the server to struggle, specifically on the first day of voting, and then when thousands of students and candidates went to check the results on Friday evening.
Apologies for these issues and any inconvenience or interruption caused.
Our current server was set up in early 2018, and handles our normal traffic well. However, it is not configured well enough to handle the high loads we are now experiencing - which is almost double what we were experiencing then, in heavy traffic periods:
We have attempted over the last few years to improve the configuration, but sadly it becomes difficult to test the success of our changes until the next high traffic incident. We did successfully book 8000 Welcome tickets in September over a day, but more complex activity like elections puts more strain on the server.
We did have a plan to rebuild the server but due to low staffing in the team this was not possible at the time. The plan now is to move to an external fully managed, load balanced server which is designed to be able to handle traffic spikes. The expectation is we will do this in summer, ready for Welcome.
However we need to retire the old website and Rosa before we can do this (see below).
New staff member (web developer)
In early May we'll have Lukmon starting as our new web developer, which is very exciting! He has experience in Drupal (the platform our website users) and is keen to get going.
Lukmon starting will enable us to get back to the business of continuous improvement and new functionality on the website. He'll be picking up the list of snagging and feature requests and working through them over the summer.
Turn off the old website
In order to upgrade our server, we need to turn off the old website once and for all. This includes:
- Webforms still processed through the old website - migrating structure, testing
- Courses (Active Bystander, Clubs & Societies) - migrating both structure and data, testing
- Appointment booking (Advice) - rebuilding more flexible booking tool, testing
- Travel Expenses / Rosa - rebuild from scratch in the new website to be fully integrated, testing
- Check traffic to pages on the old website - redirect / recreate content on new website where needed
- Create offline copy of old website for reference after transition
We will be working with affected teams over the next few months to re-implement and test any functionality in the new website.
New website snagging and reported issues
We've been collecting any reported issues and trends in the new website and have a list of what needs resolving.
Alongside closing out the old website, we'll be trying to implement as many fixes and improvements as we can from this list over the next few months going into summer.
If you have submitted an issue in the last few months, we will likely be in contact for more details or to let you know it is resolved.
Intranet
We've been working on a new way of managing Union internal staff information so you can more easily access key documents like policies, process documents, strategies, reports, etc from different Union departments. This will largely replace the SU_Shared folder on the shared drive with an easier to access and use, more informative setup.
This will need some work undertaken by each team (though more for the operational teams). We'll be in contact with departmental managers over the next month to demonstrate our prototype and work through next steps to consolidate information into one place and make finding key information a user friendly experience.