Migration to Calendar v2 starts 25 Oct; Calendar read-only for 24+ hours

I have just found out that the migration to Version 2 of the Calendar on lds.org will begin tomorrow morning, October 25, at 6:00am MDT. It is anticipated that the migration will take approximately 26 hours.

During the migration time, the calendar will be in a read-only state. So you will be able to see all events, but calendar editors and administrators will be unable to make any changes of any kind to the calendar until the migration is complete.

Version 2 will provide many great new features, and I'm looking forward to it. It would have been nice to have more advance warning regarding the migration, but we'll just have to get along without the ability to make changes for a day or so, and then we'll be back in business.

Wow, thanks very much for the info!

Why don't they ever send official notices to us about these things? It seems I never find out about anything until right before or even afterwards.

Currently we have no process for announcing changes to lds.org applications. Most of our focus for a release is on managing our internal customers.

Unfortunately, we also face the fact that a forum announcement, or even a notice on the main tech.lds.org page only reaches a small fraction of our users (granted, it's still much better than nothing). More official channels take much to long to work through. Trying to coordinate an announcement when web releases can change a day, or even hours, before a planned release is a bit tricky.

We will make an effort to coordinate between app teams to determine what the best method for standardizing on announcements is. In the meantime, our team will make a better effort to reach out on the forums.

There was a brief complete outage of the system for a few minutes this morning, but now it is in read-only mode with this announcement:

Under Maintenance - READ ONLY

Local Unit Calendar 2.0 update in progress.

As part of this update, we are converting your calendar information to function in the updated system. Your access has been restricted to READ-ONLY for approximately the next 24-48 hours.

Please be aware that if you attempt to make any changes during this process you will see limited functionality and may see occasional errors.

Once this process is complete, additional application helps will be available to help get you up and running quickly in the new system. Thank you for your patience!

jdcr256 wrote:Currently we have no process for announcing changes to lds.org applications. Most of our focus for a release is on managing our internal customers.

Unfortunately, we also face the fact that a forum announcement, or even a notice on the main tech.lds.org page only reaches a small fraction of our users (granted, it's still much better than nothing). More official channels take much to long to work through. Trying to coordinate an announcement when web releases can change a day, or even hours, before a planned release is a bit tricky.

We will make an effort to coordinate between app teams to determine what the best method for standardizing on announcements is. In the meantime, our team will make a better effort to reach out on the forums.

If I may suggest, a large percentage of ward and stake clerks probably already have a contact list for disseminating this type of information (not worldwide, perhaps, but those probably don't use the calendar yet anyway). If we received this information with a few days' notice, we could help distribute it to those who need to know. For example, I first saw this post last night after Family Home Evening and sent an e-mail to my Ward Council Distribution list giving them a heads-up that the Calendar might be read-only for a day or so and to not worry if it was (along with a disclaimer that sometimes these things have to slip at the last minute).

You still will not get everyone, but I think your success rate will be much greater with your "external customers" than what we have now. This could be similar to the e-mail that came out regarding the financial Data refresh - which is the first time I have received communication from the church at the ward calling level in this manner.

If I were to hazard a personal guess that is totally my own opinion, I would suggest that they might have decided to do the change on a Monday because they thought we would all be having Family Home Evening and not working on our calendars anyway.

Just a random thought, though. And totally my own personal opinion. Based on over 40 years of experience, I have no insight at all into why and when they do the things they do. [grin]