MOLE Upgrade

On April 12th we will begin this year's MOLE upgrade. Whilst this is an annual event, this year it is a little different, and not just because we are doing it in April.

For the last few years MOLE has been hosted on servers based in Amsterdam and this has been a very stable platform for us. This upgrade will see us moving to a brand new SaaS (Software as a Service) platform hosted on Amazon servers which will give us the same quality of service we have now but with a number of advantages:

• No more downtime for upgrades
• New features, enhancements and bug fixes will be available much more frequently as the new platform has updates on a monthly basis. Previously we have had to wait for our annual upgrade to get these
• New version of the VLE in the future. Blackboard (what we call MOLE now) have a new version called Ultra that is coming along very nicely, and moving to this new platform could give us the option of using this new VLE if and when it's appropriate for us.

We had originally planned to do the upgrade at Christmas, like we have in the past, however as you may remember we had to abort that at the last minute. So we didn't waste a lot of the work that had been done in preparation for this, the decision was made to do the upgrade as soon as possible without it having an impact on teaching. Having consulted with faculties it was agreed that the slot we are using was the best option to go for.

So, starting at 20:00 on Friday 12th MOLE will be taken offline to begin the upgrade. Because of the move to the new platform it will take slightly longer than previous upgrades but it will be available again for use no later than 18:00 on Monday 15th.

Almost nothing will change from our users point of view, it will look and function exactly like it does now with one main exception. The Manage Users tool, which is an extension to MOLE developed by a third party, has an incompatibility with the new system that stops a user being able to change someones's role in a course and we are exploring how this can be fixed. There will be a small number of new features in there but we aren't going to explore those right now because we are in the middle of teaching - these will be something to look going in to the summer so keep an eye out for more on all things new.