It’s slow. This is the most common concern from users of Mosaic. With this in mind, the Mosaic team is launching a project to tackle the challenge of system performance.

A team is working now on improving Mosaic’s performance with a focus on making the system faster. As well, Oracle, the software vendor will provide a team to assist over the coming few months. The work is focused on five areas:

• Infrastructure
• System configuration
• Queries
• Customizations
• Administrative and business processes

Each area will be reviewed to improve speed. Furthermore, representatives from high-use areas have identified the specific tasks where slowdowns are most frustrating. This input is being used to prioritize the fixes.

This project should be complete in the first quarter of 2016. Improvements will be implemented when they are identified and users can anticipate incremental changes along the way. For example, this week, additional CPUs and memory are being added to Mosaic and some pages are loading a bit faster.

The University is doing this now because Mosaic is a stage of deployment and stability where we can now fine tune specific issues.

We understand that issues with slowness create problems and frustrations for those who spend much of their work day using Mosaic. It is not unexpected that we’re experiencing some of these issues after the considerable transformation we’ve been through. In just three years most of the University’s core administrative systems have been replaced, leapfrogging 30 years of technology and making improvements such as: faster travel and expense reimbursements, online transcripts, and online pay statements.

In summary, the concerns of end users have been heard clearly and improving system performance is now the top priority for Mosaic. Work has already begun and users can expect gradual improvements over the next few months.