The Learn service is the University's primary Virtual Learning Environment hosting over 4500 courses and is classified as a High Priority service – with the expectation of 99.7% uptime (combined planned & unplanned). A key part of ensuring that the platform reaches the availability target is making sure that we are on a stable and supported version. The supplier recommends keeping up to date with service packs to reduce performance issues.

Annual upgrades to new service packs have been applied "in service" by Production Management over the past few years and this has been very successful, with a well defined process now in place. However there are additional complexities with the current release (Q4 2016) and so we anticipate this years main upgrade requiring a level of additional project management and dedicated technical resource that can't be supplied from Production Management. There are dependencies on upgrading to Java 8, and the Spring framework to ensure that building blocks function correctly; (5 x) UoE building blocks will require developer time to update.