AlertSU and Server Updates Benefit Stanford Community

University IT’s Middleware and Integration Services (MaIS) has been hard at work making system updates and implementations to benefit the entire Stanford community. Here is a snapshot of the latest and greatest updates.

AlertSU notifications now available to community members

MaIS is happy to announce a new enhancement to the AlertSU system that benefits Stanford community members who are not faculty, employees, or students, but who still work or live on campus.

AlertSU is Stanford’s emergency notification system used to communicate time-sensitive information during emergency events affecting campus, via SMS text message, email, and/or phone. In this latest enhancement, MaIS and the Department of Public Safety developed a Community Member Portal (CMP), which allows these community members to receive emergency or informational notifications from Stanford.

More information

• If you are not officially affiliated with Stanford, but work or live on campus and wish to sign up for AlertSU, please contact alertsudps@lists.stanford.edu.
• If you are a faculty or staff member, emeritus, or affiliate, you can opt in to receive alerts through StanfordYou, under the “Maintain your directory and AlertSU emergency contact information” link.
• If you are a student or postdoc, you are automatically registered to receive alerts. You can maintain your contact information through Axess.

For more information about the AlertSU mass notification system, visit AlertSU FAQ.

Upgrades to Oracle WebLogic Server

This summer, MaIS upgraded their Oracle WebLogic Servers to the latest version 12.2.1 (12cR2), which was released in October 2015. The Oracle WebLogic Servers are the workhorse behind the MaIS Java Messaging Service (JMS), where hundreds of thousands of events flow through the Registry every day to be delivered real-time across campus.

Activities such as applying for a SUNet ID, updating your personal information in StanfordYou, or changing jobs trigger a series of events that university systems listen to and monitor.

With the incredible amount of information processed each day, it’s essential that the WebLogic servers perform at a high capacity with minimal downtime. The upgrade to the latest version allows MaIS to improve the reliability, availability, scalability, and performance of JMS services with little disruption.

Here are some of the major features implemented with this upgrade:

• Java Development Kit (JDK) 8.0
• SHA2 certificate support
• Increased hardware resources

Since the upgrade, MaIS has observed a 100% increase in event capacity in the new environment with higher CPU throughput.

More information

The Oracle WebLogic release 12.2.1 (12cR2) provides a number of runtime improvements that enhance the High Availability of the system with simplified JMS Cluster Configuration. For a complete list of features in WebLogic 12cR2, see What’s New in Oracle WebLogic Server 12.2.1.

Learn more

Middleware and Integration Services (MaIS), a University IT (UIT) workgroup, provides services and technologies to the Stanford community that help manage enterprise data about people, organizations, courses, devices, workgroups, and authority.

The team supports applications the campus community uses every day, such as Authority Manager, Sponsorship Manager, Workgroup Manager, Organization Manager, and StanfordYou. In addition, they support data integration to many more systems and applications.

Learn more about MaIS or these updates by emailing as-mais-analysts@lists.stanford.edu.