20th of May, 2009

Dear ALISON Group Administrator,

ALISON Manager has experienced performance issues over the past four weeks but most acutely over the past 48 hours. We apologize unreservedly for these issues and are doing our best to resolve them as quickly as we can. We owe you an explanation for this situation which we provide below. Furthermore, we wish to advise how we are going to comprehensively deal with these issues so that you can be confident of utilizing the expanding ALISON service in the future.

Issues experienced are (i) slow access to the service (ii) the server being unreachable, and (iii), undisplayed grading and reports.

We have established the cause of these issues:

Since ALISON opened free access to ALISON Manager functionality for the ALISON ABC IT course, the demand for our free learning services has increased very considerably in a short time. This unprecedented demand has placed significant pressure on our servers as they are currently configured. We have realized that additional learners on our system are not in any way a problem. In fact, the system as it is currently configured can handle tens of thousands of synchronous learners. What has caught us off-guard is what happens when multiple administrators run reports at the same time. The processing requirements of compiling reports of 80/100 student records causes considerably more strain on our system than we had anticipated. As we have a lot of school classes across the UK and Ireland in particular approaching the end of their academic year, the generation of reports has increased dramatically and as a result our current infrastructure has struggled to cope.

To solve this first issue, we are now upgrading our servers dramatically in terms of memory, bandwidth and storage capacity. It will however take 5/7 working days to complete the system transfers we require but are already working on this. The second action we are taking is re-writing the code which triggers report formatting making the process far more efficient. We can improve the system one thousand-fold by doing this. This process is already begun but will also take 7/10 working days.

While these updates are being applied to our system, we are limiting direct access to the reporting features on the ALISON platform. However, all reports can be accessed indirectly by contacting either myself or ALISON CTO. You should have an instant response from us upon request and we should be able to provide a report for you within an hour. You can contact either Amr, myself or Maureen Berry via e-mail, Google Talk or SKYPE.

We appreciate your patience and perserverance in the coming days. When we are finished these upgrades, you will have faster and more robust learning management system and it will set a solid foundation for our expanded offering. If you have any questions or comments regarding the above, you are welcome to contact me directly by e-mail or by phoning my mobile.

Sincerely,

Mike Feerick
CEO, ALISON
+353-86-817-5691