Monthly Archives: March 2021

CUNYfirst will be unavailable from 8pm on Wednesday, March 24 until noon, Sunday, March 28th. This downtime is necessary because CUNY’s Office of Computing and Information Services (CIS) is moving the CUNYfirst application from the current hosting provider to servers located in the CUNY data center.

CIS has been preparing for this event for more than a year, and has been engaging in extensive testing and running the new servers for several months in parallel with the hosted environment. Some common questions about the migrations and answers are below:

• Why were the dates selected? CUNY selected these dates to have the least impact possible on University business processes. The dates are before fall enrollment and FY21 procurement deadlines. They also align with the start of Spring Recess.
• What exactly is happening? Right now CUNYfirst is run by a third-party hosting company on remote equipment. CUNY CIS is moving the application to servers located in the CUNY data center. This is primarily because the contract with the provider has ended and CUNY has chosen not to renew it. It will also allow CIS to have more flexibility in future upgrades and improve long-term planning.
• Will I see any difference? Users are not expected to see any changes in the CUNYfirst environment. All addresses to get to CUNYfirst services will remain unchanged; and the software, applications, and data will all be unchanged from before the migration. Please note CIS is also freezing system changes in CUNYfirst for 20 days before and 20 days after the migration, which means CIS will be deferring any software patches or feature enhancements to CUNYfirst during this time.
• What do I need to know? All access to CUNYfirst will be unavailable during the upgrade window. Students, faculty and staff should expect to not be able to enter any data into CUNYfirst or look up information in CUNYfirst during this time. Note that CUNYfirst will be unavailable, but all other services using CUNY Login will continue to work normally (Blackboard, DegreeWorks, etc.) However, services that receive CUNYfirst data will not receive that data during the migration.
• What about Baruch services? Services that depend on CUNYfirst data will not receive updates. This mostly affects account provisioning for faculty and staff, and any processes which receive data from the 805 and 856 files. Since the migration is not occurring during an enrollment or add/drop period data changes are minimal during this time.
• How should I prepare? If you work in an office that regularly enters data into CUNYfirst, plan for not being able to add data during the workdays of Thursday, March 25th and Friday, March 26th. You may wish to focus on other activities to support the office during this time. While you may be able to download certain data from CUNYfirst in advance, remember that data containing confidential information as per the CUNY Data Security Policy should remain on Baruch computers (i.e., access your office computer via VPN to work with that data.) If you are a student or faculty member, understand you will not be able to look up course information or rosters in CUNYfirst or otherwise change any personal information during that time.
• What should I do if I have questions? Information about the migration may be available from the CUNY IT Help website. We will also update our webpage with information as CIS makes it available. If you need additional help, please consult the BCTC Helpdesk.

CUNY CIS and BCTC appreciate your patience during this process, and look forward to continuing to serve your CUNYfirst needs after the migration.