GradSphere Known Issues and Updates

GradSphere is under very active development, and the team is responding to user-reported issues as quickly as possible in addition to working on new and expanded functionality. Below, you can find out more about some of the highest-priority known issues and their resolution status, as well as get the latest on changes which have been pushed into Live GradSphere. 

Known Issues

The issues posted here are those which have been reported by and/or impact multiple users. Reported issues that affect individual users are generally not included in this list, but are still high priorities for the team to address.

Status: Discovery

The following are items for which the team is exploring strategies for resolution. No ETA for deployment can yet be estimated, but they are priorities to address.

  • Student GPC Access
  • Individuals who are both graduate students and program coordinators currently have limited access to launch advanced forms on behalf of students in the programs they coordinate.

    Recommendation for Interim Resolution: Students are able to launch their own advanced forms, while your assigned Senior Academic Advisor is also able to launch forms on their behalf if the student is not able.
  • Support for Alternative Emails
  • When notifying individuals of new tasks via email, GradSphere sends notifications to folks' primary / "Directory" campus address. In cases where individuals have an alternative email set in People and Role Manager, GradSphere cannot utilize those addresses.

    Recommendation for Interim Resolution: Depending on circumstance, it may be preferable to set up an email forwarding rule to the alternative email address, or add a preferred email address through the Directory.
  • Recurring "403 - Access Denied" Errors
  • The team continues to investigate cases where "403 - Access Denied" errors can occur during the authentication process between campus single sign-on and GradSphere. The error generally implies that users' local cache/cookies are out of date, but it seems to be recurring with unusual rapidity. The developer team has partnered with IET and our vendor partner to find a resolution to this issue.

    Recommendation for Interim Resolution: Clearing cache/cookies will generally address the issue in the short term; if interrupting the active browser session is not possible, using a private/incognito window to access GradSphere can also provide a temporary workaround.

    Instructions for opening a private/incognito window:
    Firefox 
    Chrome
    Safari

    Instructions for clearing per-site cookies:
    Firefox (under "clear cookies for any website")
    Chrome (under "clear cookies for a specific site")
    Safari

Status: Testing

The following are items for which a resolution has been implemented in a Developer environment, and are undergoing testing before being deployed to Live GradSphere.

  • Reviewer Instructions Language and Functionality Update
  • The Reviewer Instructions feature is being revised to present more explicit "Approve/Return/Deny" instructions to users. It will also feature links to students' GradHub and OASIS profiles, as well as a link to the student's GS-hosted program website. We expect this change to be deployed in the next minor update push.
  • QE Report Fail Notifications
  • For Failed QEs, the email students receive upon the Report being finalized is being revised to better aid and guide students in this difficult situation. This change requires a process addition, and so careful testing is required to ensure only those students who need the addition receive it, but we expect that this change will be deployed relatively soon.

Update History

The following is a record of items which have been pushed to Live GradSphere. Only updates to GradSphere itself are displayed here, and not updates to related tools (e.g. GradHub or PRM).

  • 1.10.0 - July 10, 2024 - ATC and Plan II/MFA Form Updates
  • - For clarity and simplicity's sake, the Advancement to Candidacy Application no longer presents doctoral students with an optional coursework grid.
    - The leftover use of MS in "MFA and MS Plan II Report", which was understandably confusing for students in programs awarding MA Plan II degrees, has been corrected. The form is now consistently referred to as the "MFA and Master's Plan II Report". 
    - Routing changes were put in place for certain QE Report outcomes to more rapidly get them to the staff within GS who can act on them.
  • 1.9.7 - July 5, 2024 - Filing Notification and QE Report Updates
  • - The email subject lines for Filing Process notifications were adjusted to remove reference to "Thesis/Dissertation Release" for students who do not do theses or dissertations. 
    - The approval email students receive upon a Filing Process being approved was updated to remove reference to campus email-for-life, as that feature is sadly going away. 
    - The QE Report Emergency Note field had a character limited added, to avoid a circumstance where very long entries could interrupt the underlying process model. 
  • 1.9.5 - June 25, 2024 - Process Model Changes, Email Template Updates
  • - To aid in diagnostics, the process model underpinning review of Candidacy Applications has been changed to retain records for 14 days, instead of 3. 
    - Hanging Legacy Form process models have been addressed. 
    - The email sent to students once the Director of Policy and Program Initiatives has reviewed requests for unusually-long thesis/dissertation embargoes has been updated to better clarify the decision made and next steps. 
  • 1.9.2 - June 17, 2024 - Conferral Letter Generation, "My Students" Updates
  • - A UI bug affecting Filing reviews for students in Designated Emphases was squished. 
    - Access to the My Students tab was expanded to include the Director of Policy and Program Initiatives.
    - The Filing process can now automatically generate conferral letters.
  • 1.8.4 - June 7, 2024 - Filing Updates, Addressing Minor Bugs
  • - The Filing process was updated with a small Spring grace period, to allow students to submit past the deadline.
    - Language in the QE Application Review process was updated slightly to eliminate grammatical oddities.
    - A bug was squished in the Task Reassignment email process.
  • 1.8.0 - May 31, 2024 - My Students/My Application Grid Updates, GPC Notifications
  • - The My Students and My Applications grids have been updated to harmonize their UIs, and now feature the ability to search and filter for program codes!
    - GPCs are now copied on the emails students receive when QE Report Passes are recorded.
  • 1.6.2 - May 21, 2024 - PDF Template Updates
  • - The templates which fuel GradSphere's export functionality have been updated to better-reflect current GS Advising Team organization.
  • 1.6.1 - May 17, 2024 - Reviewer Instructions, Routing Changes, and QE Report Improvements
  • - Customized reviewer instructions are now being presented in all advanced forms. 
    - Graduate Studies internal approval routing has been streamlined to better-fit Advising Team needs. 
    - The QE Report now more clearly captures actual exam date, in cases where date applied-for and date completed vary.
    - Graduate Studies review of external QE members has been adjusted to better fit revised Graduate Council policy.
  • 1.4.4 - May 8, 2024 - Task Reassignment and PDF Fixes
  • - The PDF exports sent from GradSphere to GradHub when a Filing Process form is approved in GradSphere were not including DE Completion Reports. This has been fixed!
    - Fixed an issue where certain special characters could break PDF generation.
    - An issue which was preventing certain Graduate Studies staff from being able to reassign tasks has been addressed. 
  • 1.4.2 - May 6, 2024 - Email Notification Fixes
  • - The QE Application was not sending emails to program folks in its approval pathway. This has been fixed, so that GPCs and Faculty Advisors will receive notifications for new QE Applications arriving with them. 
    - Wording was updated in the email notification to Committee Chairs when a student initiated a Filing to Graduate, to more explicitly guide Chairs to their next action step.
  • 1.4.1 - May 3, 2024 - Advancement to Candidacy Additions
  • - Coursework entries will now allow fractional unit counts, to better support campus's .5-unit courses.
    - Candidacy applications for Plan II Masters' degrees will no longer create null committee rows. This bug was affecting later submissions of Plan II Culminating Work Reports. 
    - Coursework grids, too, are now no longer creating null rows.
  • 1.3.0 - April 26, 2024 - Eligibility Fixes
  • - Faculty listed as Chairs on students' Candidacy forms must no longer be affiliated with the students' graduate program/group.
    - Individuals with PRM Departmental accounts no longer experience eligibility bugs. 
    - Task visibility for GPCs in Task Reassignment has been improved to better filter for GPCs' own program/group.
    - A bug affecting the ability of GPCs in more than one program/group to launch forms for students in more than one of the GPC's programs/groups has been fixed.
    - QE eligibility bugs affecting two Emeriti title codes (1132 and 3249) have been fixed.
  • 1.2.0 - April 12, 2024 - Candidacy Coursework, Eligibility, and Group Assignments
  • - Advancement to Candidacy coursework grid now features simplified language for indicating older coursework.
    - Means of checking eligibility for committee service have been updated so as to return results which are not case-sensitive, simplifying committee entry on mobile platforms. 
    - Updated automatic group assignments to ensure that access control for Associate Deans and Directors of Advising within Graduate Studies is more reliable.
  • 1.1.0 - April 5, 2024 - Advancement to Candidacy Fixes
  • - Important fixes have been deployed to the Advancement to Candidacy form to address routing issues discovered in certain cases. Affected users have been contacted. 
    - A legacy form for Candidacies in the Joint Degree Program in Ecology has been added.
  • 1.0 - April 1, 2024 - Launch!
  • GradSphere is live, with five advanced and nineteen legacy forms!

Downtime Log

In the interest of providing full transparency to the campus community, this section records outages GradSphere has experienced and provides as much insight into the root cause of each outage as Graduate Studies has available.

  • Upgrade-Related Downtime - July 16, 2024 - 6 AM to 8 AM
  • GradSphere will have two hours of planned downtime on the morning of Tuesday, July 16th, as our vendor partner upgrades GradSphere's foundation to the latest version of their software. 
  • Maintenance-Related Downtime - July 5, 2024 - 5 AM to 7 AM
  • At the request of Appian Support, GradSphere was taken offline for two hours to implement changes Appian believes may offer a potential solution to the ongoing "403" issue. The downtime was communicated ahead of time via email and the GradSphere website. Service was restored by 7 AM as planned. 
  • Complete Outage - May 30, 2024 - 10:45 AM to 1:30 PM

  • The production, test, and development environments of GradSphere experienced total inaccessibility from late morning to early afternoon. The outage was connected with a worldwide degradation of Appian service relating to management of networking infrastructure.

    Website Updates:
    2:15 PM: The vendor has confirmed that full availability has been restored to GradSphere's instance. We've added a Downtime Log to the Known Issues and Updates page, and will provide any further information we receive from the vendor on this outage in that log. 

    1:30 PM: The vendor appears to have restored service to the region and server instance where GradSphere lives, and we are told that "significant restoration" will continue through the next hour. GradSphere is now accessible, but the team will be keeping a sharp eye out for difficulties. We'll be receiving further updates from the vendor, and expect to receive a Root Cause Analysis on the outage in the near future.

    12:30 PM: The vendor has shared that they are starting to see "signs of recovery", but expect that "at least one hour" more will be required before normal service is restored. We expect to receive another update by 1:00.

    12:05 PM: Our platform vendor has devised a solution to the outage affecting GradSphere, and is undertaking the manual effort necessary to ensure the solution reaches Davis promptly. We have been advised that we'll be seeing improvements within the hour, although they have not yet provided a firm ETA on a complete resolution. We expect further updates by 12:30.

    11:30 AM: GradSphere is currently experiencing an outage! The platform vendor is investigating the issue, and we expect an update by Noon.

    Email to gradcoordinators List:
    As you may have seen, GradSphere is down! The platform's vendor, Appian, is investigating the outage, and keeping our lead developer in the loop as they work toward a resolution. The current status is that we’ve not received a firm ETA on a fix, but have been told to expect a resolution no earlier than 1:30 PM PDT today. 

    Should this great lunchtime frustration linger much further (particularly as we approach a critical time of year for student form submission), Graduate Studies will have an alternative means of recording student milestones ready for you and your students as quickly as possible. For the time being, we will take the vendor at their word and expect resolution promptly, with normal service in GradSphere restored early this afternoon. 

    As the matter develops, the GS team will continue to post rolling updates on the GradSphere page, so you can keep an eye there for the very latest updates. Please feel welcome to share the status page with affected students and faculty Advisors, too; in the meantime, we are grateful for both your patience and theirs.