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October 4, 2000 Before going into the details, the obvious question is "What does this mean to me?". First, your update is faster -- in some cases substantially faster! Second, the process is much smoother (fewer problems). Last but not least, you don't have to do a thing. Our staff takes care of everything for you. The existing transmission process involved many manual steps and continuous monitoring by our operations staff. These price of these manual steps was time. The new process automates many of the time-consuming, manual steps performed during an update, starting with the transmission from the client to ECSI through the installation of the latest data from ECSI. Our new process takes advantage of the industry standard FTP protocol for faster file transfers. We also make use of our new server equipment which significantly reduces the time it takes to perform the physical update. This step alone can save from ten to thirty minutes depending on the client's size. With all this automation, you may ask "Is this as safe as the old process?". The answer is that the new process is much safer than the old process. Previously, many steps relied on our operators to catch every problem. While they have a high accuracy rate, the automated tests score 100%. Also, the computer never misses a step (in a perfect world at least). For the rare event that a problem does arise, our operations staff monitors the process as closely as they did previously, during the manual process. Schools benefiting the most are those utilizing a firewall or performing their own transmissions. The new process is much easier to configure for schools who are behind a firewall because of using the industry standard FTP protocol. Many sites will not even require support from their networking staff. In addition, the entire update process has been reduced to two simple commands. If you were doing updates the old way, you will appreciate the simplicity. This process has been in beta-test for the past seven months with several clients, so it is not technically "new". After hundreds of tests, we felt the process was mature enough for general release so that all clients could benefit. Changing to the new transmission procedures requires no special intervention on the client's part. Our operations staff will deliver everything you need during the next scheduled transmission. We even include the ability to automatically update the process without human intervention. We hope that you find this new feature useful. As always, if you have any comments or suggestions, please send them to Admin@ecsi.net.
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