LMS Outage: Exclusive view of UC Davis contract with Scriba

When I first heard about the recent LMS outage at UC Davis – which left the school with no LMS access for a full week and without a fully functional LMS through the remainder of the spring term – it was quite clear that this was an unusual situation. There have been plenty of other LMS outages, but with this one not only did UC Davis lose days of system access, during the outage they had no idea if and when the system would be restored. Any useful communication with the vendor ceased, and the school had to scramble and invent their own disaster recovery on the fly.

What we didn’t know at the time was whether UC Davis staff had planned for such a contingency and had reasonable controls in place. Thanks to the media relations and IT teams at UC Davis, we at e-Literate now have the contract with Scriba to help answer these questions. I have also talked to Ian Dolphin, executive director at the Apereo Foundation that runs the Sakai project, and Michael Sanders, CEO of Scriba, to gather and verify the data in this post.