Manager's Blog: BioPortal Software Updates

Submitted by graybeal on January 20, 2016 - 15:22

We apply an agile philosophy to providing releases, moving quickly when feasible and appropriate to address issues and add features. When changes are not urgent or are coupled with other work, we will group them into monthly releases to minimize work and communication overhead. We believe this provides the best value to you, and welcome your communication about the urgency of particular changes.

As you might imagine, being agile means taking some risks, even though we try to minimize them! If BioPortal briefly acts up or goes down, please give it a few minutes and try again — usually we’ll have everything back to normal very quickly. Although BioPortal is a complex research system without 24x7 operational support, we’re targeting system availability of 99.9%. This is an aggressive target, so we have to quickly minimize any outages that do occur.
 
Please let us know if you see persistent problems, and we will pursue them as aggressively as we can.
 
This is the first in a series of informal communications from the BioPortal management and team. Our goal is to let you know what to expect as BioPortal continues to respond to community and requests for more and better services. Please don't hesitate to contact us via the support list, or contact the BioPortal Technical Manager directly at jgraybeal - at - stanford.edu.