Remnant of SmartSite enters storage on June 30

This is it. What’s left of SmartSite will go offline next month.

But first, thanks to a tool created at UC Santa Cruz, materials in Resources folders inside old SmartSite sites will be copied into Box folders that the sites’ owners can have if they want. The owners can then keep or discard the materials as they wish.

Information and Educational Technology (IET) is making the copies to provide additional support, particularly for faculty, as the campus closes out its use of SmartSite.

Canvas replaced SmartSite as the main campus learning management system a year ago. On June 30, 2018, the remnant of SmartSite will enter digital storage. Instructional materials, submissions, and gradebooks in old SmartSite sites will become retrievable only through special administrative access, which is scheduled to end in June 2020.

SmartSite has remained available in limited form during 2017-18 to allow time for faculty and staff to extract documents, photos, or other files they might want for future use. Students were asked a year ago to retrieve any materials they planned to keep.

IET continues to offer assistance to faculty and staff who need a replacement service for project sites they have owned in SmartSite. These typically non-instructional sites were used for anything from research to scheduling club events. A guided survey at smartsiteprojects.ucdavis.edu can help project site owners identify alternatives.

More about the Box folders

The ability to make copies of files in Resources takes advantage of a tool, Slugmover, created by a programmer at UC Santa Cruz and modified by a programmer at UC Davis. Like Davis, Santa Cruz has been moving from a Sakai-based learning management system to Canvas.

The Box folder will contain copies of files from the Resources folder in each site where an individual is listed as the site’s instructor or organizer; resources from sites in which individuals are just participants will not be included. Site owners can contact smartsite-help@ucdavis.edu starting May 15 to request access to their Box folder.

Gradebook materials will not be copied into the folders. The campus is creating a process for extracting and securely delivering that information for instructors who might request it after June 30.

Faculty and staff can also continue to copy any materials they have in SmartSite through their usual access until June 30, although any sensitive data (such as gradebook information) must be stored appropriately. The campus Data Sensitivity Guide has more information.

If you have questions or comments about any aspect of the end of SmartSite, please contact smartsite-help@ucdavis.edu.