To understand this explanation, you need to know that there are two distinct sections of the E-Filing system in Indiana:
1) The section you interact with as a filer is called an E-Filing Service Provider (EFSP). The largest EFSPs in Indiana are the Tyler system, the Indiana Prosecutors' CMS, The Public Defenders' CMS and Doxpop. We provide the part of the system you interact with to get your work done.
2) Behind the scenes, all of the EFSPs connect to a single E-Filing Manager (EFM). The EFM takes the filing information that the EFSPs assemble into envelopes and write that information to the Odyssey system used by the courts. Tyler Technologies operates Indiana's EFM.
So in our case, the primary flow of data is Doxpop > EFM > Courts.
On Thursday evening, Tyler migrated Indiana's EFM to a cloud-based server. It didn't go smoothly. The result was a nearly complete outage lasting from Thursday night through the close of business on Monday. During this time, the EFM was extremely slow- Slow enough that it was essentially unusable.
On Friday, all EFSPs were affected. Over the weekend, Tyler managed to get the connection to their EFSP working well. However, the interface used by the Prosecutors, Public Defenders, Doxpop, and other smaller EFSPs was still unusable on Monday. Doxpop reported this early Monday morning, and provided Tyler with all of the information we had available.
At 9:50 PM on Monday, Tyler reported that they completely fixed the interface used by the EFSPs, including Doxpop, that were affected on Monday. We'll be monitoring the system closely on Tuesday morning to confirm this, and ask that our users quickly report any issues they run into so we can let Tyler know if the fix applied Monday evening did the job.
Thanks to all of our users for your extraordinary patience and kindness during Friday and Monday. We were having two very bad days, but you made it a lot better by being so understanding!
Similarly, although it's tempting to point fingers, we really can't complain about the team at Tyler. Upgrades of this magnitude are no fun for anyone. They were having a very bad day too, but Tyler stuck with it until all of the issues were resolved. We appreciate that their technicians were hard at work well into the evening tonight.
Did this outage cause you to miss any filing deadlines? If so, please read our previous blog post, which explains how the trial rules address this situation.
5 comments:
We noticed that DoxPop was extremely slow this morning when we efiled. It has not been my experience that DoxPop has ever been this slow.
Mary Jane at Richardson & Richardson
Thanks for that information Mary Jane. We're currently working with Tyler and have let them know that although the system is a little better, they still have to improve the performance. Don't worry, we won't stop bugging them until performance is back to the levels we had before their cloud migration!
Nothing is working right. It just took roughly one hour to efile four documents for the same case on Odyssey. At this pace, I'll get done with all 37 cases I need to file on (today) by this time next month. Why isn't the "old system" put back online until the cloud system is proven to be functional?
Justin, We agree, this is a mess. I just sent an urgent message to the folks at Tyler asking that they take action. I think that they are committed to moving forward with the cloud based system, so it's unlikely they'll put it in reverse at this point, but it should be entirely possible to increase the available resources to make the system work.
We cannot file anything with the Court. Just a repeated error message.
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