Timetabling Service Annual Rebuild and Roll Forward to 17/18

The Scientia Timetabling system has a database for each academic year. This is rolled forward each year to allow activities (lectures, tutorials, labs, other misc classes) and  rooms etc to be scheduled and allocated for the new academic year.

The roll-forward takes place in steps at appropriate times in the calendar. This is compliance work that is too large to be delivered within the current support budget.

Typically, core teaching events are rolled forward in November (with rooms removed) , new instances of the web applications are made available in December,  a new database for the forthcoming  academic year  is released in April and tasks to enable a switch-over from one academic year to the next in July and August each year (for live feed to room monitors etc).

Due to space and memory contraints on the servers - the Timetabling system can only hold the 3 databases for the previous year, current year and next year - at any one point - so before creating new Web Apps a previous Database and App has to be decommissioned and removed to make enough space / memory available