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CalAgenda Technical Support Process
Purging Data
Recovering Data
Service Availability
Service Standards
Security Standards
The CalAgenda service relies on a tiered tech support process. Departmental tech support staff are the front-line support providers and are usually able to handle the day-to-day questions and problems. If a problem comes up that they can't fix, they can contact the CalAgenda Tech Support mailing list via e-mail. (This is a closed mailing list. Only identified departmental tech support providers can send email to the list.) Everyone on the list is a CalAgenda technical support provider in their department. If CalAgenda tech support is also stumped, Oracle, the vendors of Oracle Calendar, will be contacted.
In order to keep subscribers' calendars loading quickly, each month all subscribers' data will be purged of information older than 24 months.
An alternative if only one or two people in an administrative domain need to preserve their data for more than 24 months, is for the individuals to export their calendar data to their own computer using the Export Data ... command found in Oracle Calendar. See Exporting and importing data From CalAgenda for specifics.
The CalAgenda service is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week except during the following times:
Daily
Between 11:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. each day, backups are performed. Connected subscribers will remain connected, but will not be able to change their calendar. New connections will be refused so you will not be able to login during this time period.
Second Sundays
On the second Sunday of every month, the system will be down (unavailable) from 12 midnight to 12 noon, while a complete backup of the subscriber data and other maintenance work are done.
Other
The CalAgenda tech support list will be notified of planned service disruptions outside these hours several days in advance. You can also find notifications of systems outages on the UC Berkeley system status page at http://ucbsystems.org/.
For departments already subscribed to CalAgenda
For those actions that cannot be handled through the Calagenda Admin web site (https://calagenda-admin.berkeley.edu) the central CalAgenda Admin will handle them within two working days. This includes:
- adding new resources
- adding or modifying role or resource accounts
- removing resources
- resetting resource account passwords
For new departments subscribing to Calagenda
New departments can begin using the CalAgenda service within 5 working days after CalAgenda administration receives the signup form with a valid chartstring. See http://calagenda.berkeley.edu/adminresources/checklist/index.html for details.
The UC Berkeley campus has mandated that all devices attached to the campus network comply with the campus's Minimum Security Standards for Networked Devices by May 1, 2005.
The CalAgenda service is complying with that policy. In addition to continuing to maintain tight security over the server computers which provide the service, CalAgenda protects its users by implementing a key requirement of the Minimum Security Standards, no unencrypted authentication, in the following ways:
When a user connects to CalAgenda via the Web by clicking the "View Your Calendar" link on the CalAgenda home page, the entire connection between their browser and CalAgenda website is encrypted using Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS), the same type of encryption that is used on other secure campus websites and on popular e-commerce websites. This encrypts the user's username and password, as well as their data, in transmission between their computer and the CalAgenda website.
Connections between the CalAgenda "web client" and the CalAgenda service itself - which run on the same host computer - occur within a secure computing environment in the campus Data Center, and usernames and passwords are encrypted using the triple-DES encryption protocol.
The Oracle Calendar applications for Microsoft Windows and the Mac OS, as well as the Motif-based Oracle Calendar applications for Linux and Solaris, provide an enhanced, 'platform-native' experience for accessing the CalAgenda service. These applications are available for downloading by CalAgenda users via the "Download Software" link on the CalAgenda home page.
When a user connects to CalAgenda via version 9.0.4 or higher of the Oracle Calendar application, its default ('out of the box') authentication method is Standard Authentication (referred to in Oracle documentation as "cs-standard"). This encrypts both their username and password using the triple-DES encryption protocol when authenticating to CalAgenda. Password changes are encrypted in the same manner as logins.
The Oracle Client application also offers a second, user-selectable authentication method, "CST Basic Authentication" ("cs-basic"), although its use is discouraged. This is based on a proprietary encryption mechanism, and has been retained solely for backward compatibility with some older products.
The Standard Authentication method encrypts only a CalAgenda user's username and password. It does not encrypt any other data as it is transmitted between the Oracle Calendar application on their computer and the CalAgenda service. For instance, when a user views a calendar, the calendar events that are downloaded from the CalAgenda service to the Oracle Calendar application on their computer, and any additions or changes to calendar events uploaded from this application to CalAgenda, are transmitted in clear text.
For added security, users can optionally configure their settings, via options accessible through the login dialog in the Oracle Calendar desktop application, to apply encryption to the entire connection between the Oracle Calendar desktop application and the CalAgenda service. This strengthens the protection of the user's username and password by applying an additional level of encryption, as well as encrypting all of the user's data as it is transmitted between the application and the CalAgenda service.
The Oracle Calendar desktop application offers two encryption options: "Light Encryption" (referred to in Oracle documentation as "cs-light") and Affine Cypher ("cs-acipher1"), The Affine Cypher option provides a somewhat stronger level of encryption than the Light Encryption option. In general, applying encryption may slow the rate at which data is transmitted between the desktop application and the CalAgenda service, although that slowdown may not always be readily perceptible.
The CalAgenda service offers a variety of mechanisms for synchronizing calendar data - and in some cases tasks ("to do lists") and contact information, as well - between the CalAgenda service and mobile devices such as PDAs and certain "smart" mobile phones. This includes software for Windows for syncing with Palm OS and PocketPC devices and with Microsoft Outlook, as well as software for the Mac OS for syncing with Palm OS devices.
The synchronization software from Oracle Corporation available for downloading by CalAgenda users via the "Download Software" link on the CalAgenda home page, defaults to using the authentication method specified by the CalAgenda server. That method is Standard Authentication ("cs-standard") which, as described above, encrypts usernames and passwords using triple-DES encryption.
