How many days for updated meeting time to appear on meetinghouse locator?

[BrianEdwards]

Here we are on Thursday and it's still not updated. Maybe I'll call GSC today and see what they know. We periodically get visitors and I want people to see the correct time on the meetinghouse locator. But if it takes days for that to update, it's kind of useless.

Since there's a bit of uncertainty here in the Forum, hopefully you can also post whatever info GSC provides, so that we have a good reference going forward. I know with building addresses there's been some discussion about potential dual databases that both need updating (for the meetinghouse locator and for the FM Group, I believe). So it would be good to make certain that by updating meeting times in LCR, that is sufficient to cover all bases. And that we can make changes as often as is required. II expect yes, but would be good to confirm that's still true in Aug 2024...

[mevans]

I called GSC. They checked and saw that the update had been applied to CDOL (I forgot that CDOL has meeting times, but I looked up our ward and saw it's there).

The person at GSC said there are "a bunch of different systems." She couldn't figure out the problem and took screenshots to show the disparities and created a ticket for someone to look at the problem. I guess there's still a day to see if it gets fixed before Sunday. I'll see what happens.

[russellhltn]

I got the impression one time that there's two CDOLs - the old one that was taken off-line due to security concerns and the new one that we have now. (Or maybe the old one is now fully retired - things change.)

I don't envy the developers that effectively have to develop on live systems.

[garystroble]

I got the impression one time that there's two CDOLs - the old one that was taken off-line due to security concerns and the new one that we have now. (Or maybe the old one is now fully retired - things change.)

I don't envy the developers that effectively have to develop on live systems.

Nor the users that have to deal with live systems being up/downgraded while in use.

[lajackson]

The person at GSC said there are "a bunch of different systems."

And the moral of this story is, never post in one convenient centralized place what you can easily post in many places where you are able to forget to update some of them from time to time.

I fully agree with russellhltn:

I don't envy the developers that effectively have to develop on live systems.

[mevans]

GSC got back to me and told me they weren't able to get the fix done in time. But, I just checked and saw that Meetinghouse Locator was updated! So, either someone hung around late on a Friday and got it working, or a miracle occurred and the systems finally synced.

Here's something else the GSC said:
"I did also find out that the system should update automatically after you make the changes in LCR, but it can take up to three days. In this case it looks like it didn't update correctly, however in the future it may respond correctly if you need to do this again."

Granted, I'm a technical person and the person who wrote this probably wasn't too careful with words, but this statement doesn't give me much comfort: "in the future it may respond correctly"

And the moral of this story is, never post in one convenient centralized place what you can easily post in many places where you are able to forget to update some of them from time to time.

While it's great to have everything in one centralized place, it's easier said than done. Any large organization is going to have a variety of systems. Some of them will be custom-built software and others will be commercial systems. Just trying to figure out the appropriate place to get certain data can be a challenge when you have a lot of systems. Even though it can be complex, it should be able to work reliably and notify people about problems so they can be resolved. There are even orchestration systems you can buy to help with these integrations. Perhaps improving systems integration is not an important area for the church right now. I'm working on improving a system integration with a third party for my employer right now, and it can be quite painful and time consuming to get it working correctly, as well as identify error situations and how to handle them--especially if you don't have control over some systems (vendor APIs, third-party providers, etc.). But it's taken us a few years to put effort into improving this integration. I can understand the desire to make it work vs. having the budget to fix the problem. But maybe now that the church is aware of the problem, someone will investigate further.

I don't envy the developers that effectively have to develop on live systems.

Maybe you're referring to trying to troubleshoot something in production? I don't know what the church IT department does internally, but I do remember 12-15 years ago when they were asking church members to help that we had access to non-production systems on which we could test. But, considering the church has several systems, it may be unlikely that they have a full sandbox running of all the disparate systems talking with each other.

[mevans]

GSC got back to me and told me they weren't able to get the fix done in time. But, I just checked and saw that Meetinghouse Locator was updated! So, either someone hung around late on a Friday and got it working, or a miracle occurred and the systems finally synced.

I take that back...I just checked again and it no longer has the revised time. So I started hitting refresh and it alternates between the correct time and incorrect time. So it looks like it's load balanced and one server is updated and the other isn't. That's really strange. I would expect servers to be hitting the same data source.

But now that I'm doing it more, it looks like the revised time is sticking. Strange stuff.

[jonesrk]

I got the impression one time that there's two CDOLs - the old one that was taken off-line due to security concerns and the new one that we have now. (Or maybe the old one is now fully retired - things change.)

There are still 2, but the old one is only for CHQ and only until we can get the new one to have all the edit functionality that the old one has

I don't envy the developers that effectively have to develop on live systems.

It's definitely interesting trying to fully retire the old system, especially since it had been around for so long and had so many things entangled in it. We are getting there but there's a lot to the membership and unit systems. And like you said trying to keep two systems living and in agreement with each other can be challenging.

[mevans]

I updated our meeting times back to the normal time on Sunday evening. New CDOL wasn't updated on Sunday, but I just checked it now on Monday and see that the meeting time has been updated. It's still not updated on Meetinghouse Locator. I'll check back tomorrow.

[mevans]

I checked today and the reverted meeting time hasn't appeared yet. But, I guess 3 days won't be until tomorrow.