Overview

Background

CalSync embraces the trend of “bring your own device” and allows students to take full advantage of their own mobile, smartphone or tablet. Students can access their calendars whilst on the move with a comprehensive view of the day’s activities and location, whenever and wherever.

Student Timetable information is published to the Calsync Reporting Database (Calsync DB) overnight and updated every 10 minutes from the main Timetabling Database. The Calsync application will pull timetabling information (students, lessons, rooms, course groups, student course groups) from the Calsync DB  into the Calsync Database at intervals shown on the scheduling section of the Calsync Admin Console. The Calsync application will create batches of inserts, updates and deletes to Office 365 using the EWS Service (Exchange Web Service) and these Web Services will update the Student Calendars

CalSync is a third party product supplied by S2 Unified which is designed to pull data from Timetabling and push it into Office 365. CalSync pulls staff, student, and activity data from the CS_* views in the CALSYNC_RDB database (which is installed on a separate server to the core Timetabling SDB and year-specific RDBs).  The CALSYNC_RDB is not year-specifc, i.e. we do not create a new RDB for Calsync every year.  The RDB refresh process defines which year-specific SDB is used to populate the CALSYNC_RDB, so the basis of the roll-forward is on determining when and how to change the configuration of the RDB refresh process.

The Live roll-forward should take place in early July, just before we begin the first batch of student allocations for the coming year, which normally falls somewhere between 10^th-14^th July.

The CalSync tool is used to take all student timetabling data from the Timetabling system and automatically populate students O365 calendar's with their lecture and tutorial schedule.

The CalSync tool requires upgraded every couple of years

CalSync  manages the bulk management of scheduled timetabling events to Office 365 calendars, so that students can see their timetabling events in their Office 365 calendars.

CalSync is a critical component of the student experience

Scope

This project will revise the versions of CalSync we're running and either bring both instances in sync to the latest or simply update the Teaching one so that it's in line with the later Exams instance.

This project will update CalSync instances to the latest stable release

• for exams
  • exam timetabling consists of 70,000 events
• for teaching
  • teaching timetabling consists of over 5 million events

During this process  we discovered that a new version is being released in October 2019 and that this project should no longer continue with an  upgrade this year :

•  Please see Organisation for further details

Out of Scope

Provision of events from other systems (such as event booking) is out of scope of this project

CalSync does not exist in DEV (and so only TEST and LIVE are included in this project)

Objectives & Deliverables

Objective is to upgrade CalSync to the latest release.

This work has to be completed separately for each instance

Benefits

CalSync is a critical component of the student experience

Upgrading CalSync will

• lengthen end of life
• avoidance of known issues in previous versions
• have increased security
• have increased support

Success Criteria

• Calsync has been successfully upgraded on Test and Live for exam timetabling (if required)
• Calsync has been successfully upgraded on Test and Live for Teaching (Must Have)
• Minimal disruption during the upgrade
• CalSync interface transfers to Office 365 as expected

Project Milestones

(Please copy and paste from Milestones log)