For the first time in eleven years CU Ecommerce enjoyed its very first planned outage last week. If you have an ecommerce page live and in action you should have received an email about this as well as a reassurance that we would only take the service out of play for four hours, which we just about managed!
The upgrade came about for reasons of compliance to the standards of the Payments Card Industry (PCI). They basically allow Carleton to take credit card payments but only as long as they comply to a high security standard. Obviously, the University sets the highest standards when it comes to security, but it does help to be able to leverage information on security from PCI.
In this instance, by March 31st of this year we had to upgrade our servers away from Red Hat 6 – the operating that runs on the server. We managed that and the upgrade has met the terms of the compliance.
Simultaneously, we moved the payments websites into cuTheme. This is the only service in which sites can currently be deployed. However, we hope to have an update on cuTheme soon.
Did everything go 100% to plan?
To be clear, 99% of the migration was a 100% success. We are currently working in a couple of areas to fix everything so it is better (and better looking) than before. A lot of the issues are to do with styles on the front end of the payments pages – which determine generally how things look, with some impact on how forms are submitted. However, we have a list of these and are all working towards solving all these issues this week. Meanwhile, if you notice anything that is not functioning as it should, please contact the ITS Service Desk.
Speaking of which, you all very kindly contact the ITS Service Desk via a form called the CU Ecommerce support form. People have had one or two issues accessing that form recently. The department within ITS that creates these kinds of forms is working to fix the issues as quickly as possible. In the meantime you can visit this page to use our temporary CU Ecommerce support form.
It will filter your request to the appropriate groups within ITS so we can address whatever your needs are as quickly as possible.
Again you can access the form here: