During this server upgrade, we made several important security updates and moved ManageBac behind a stronger hardware firewall that is designed to mitigate (stronger, more intense) DDoS attacks.

As we described in our prior blog post roughly two weeks ago, ManageBac was hit by several DDoS attacks. Our security consultants traced these attacks back to a school in Abu Dhabi, U.A.E. whose servers may have been compromised.

We contacted the school earlier this week and the matter is now being dealt with internally. The subsequent DDoS attempts have been stopped and have not caused any further downtime to ManageBac.

If you’ve never used ManageBac to register students on IBIS, it is a simple three-step process:

1) Students fill out their Plan worksheets.

2) The coordinator reviews the plans and then Locks All Worksheets, which prevents students from making further changes.

3) The coordinator clicks Register via IBIS, and the student information is automatically entered onto IBIS.

We also offer PDF exports of the students’ information.

For more information on registering students on IBIS, please refer to our support tutorials.

ManageBac will be unavailable during this 4-hour window. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.

The account will automatically reset after the time indicated in the upper right, so please feel free to add, delete, or edit data. We’ve built it so you can experiment.

A few tips on navigation:

1) The demo account automatically opens up in the IB Coordinator view of a student’s CAS worksheet. You can use the links at the top to navigate into other areas of the Diploma Programme, or go directly into the Middle Years or Primary Years.

2) If you would like to view ManageBac as a Student, Parent, or Teacher, click on Select User at the top.

We will continue display links at the top for easy navigation, but please feel free to explore any additional areas on your own.

The more detailed itinerary:
May 6-May 10: Sydney and Canberra
May 13-May 17: Melbourne
May 20-May 31: Adelaide

Planned highlights include presenting at a regional PYP network meeting on May 9 in Canberra, and presenting at the South Australia MYP network meeting on May 23 in Adelaide.

We look forward to meeting with old and new customers next month. Please drop us a line if you’d like us to visit your school or present at your regional meeting.

Please ensure that your photos are saved in PNG, JPEG or GIF format with the photo name matching the student ID (e.g. 89012.png). Student IDs can easily be bulk updated via Users > Update Profiles.

For best results, we recommend portrait photos with the dimensions 300px by 300px. Please ensure that each photo is less than 1 Mb.

For schools using our Reports feature, we now provide the option of displaying the student photo on the report cover sheet. Please edit the cover sheet for an existing template, and check the Student Photo option.

Once the report is generated, a photo will display next to the student name along with any additional information.

A DDoS attack occurs when there is a flood of Internet traffic targeting a server and consuming all resources, thereby blocking legitimate traffic.

As a precaution, our hosting provider RackspaceCloud null routed our servers at 7:22 pm EST i.e. all external traffic was blocked, so we setup a load balancer within the RackspaceCloud network and routed all traffic back in two phases: HTTPS traffic was restored at 8:41 pm, and HTTP traffic was back at 8:56 pm.

We apologize for this and our team was working to return systems to normal immediately after receiving the first downtime alert via Pingdom. We have added traffic filters and an additional load balancer, so if this re-occurs we will immediately route traffic again to minimize any disruption.

[Edit: We are back! Apologies for the two hours of downtime. We will post a complete update within the next hour.]

• ATL Evaluation Tables: within MYP classes, you can now easily evaluate the ATL skills covered using customizable rubrics within each class. Administrators can enable or adjust these rubrics under Settings > Middle Years > Rubrics & Options. On reports, the ATL table will be displayed both on the Summary of Achievement and the individual class reports.
  

• CAS and EE Evaluations: you can now enable rubrics for CAS and EE under Settings > DP > Rubrics & Options. We have also updated the icons for the Diploma core.
  
  
• Attendance: can now be placed with either the Cover Sheet or Summary of Achievement.
  
  
  

• Header Labels: can be fully customized in both English and any UTF-8 supported language.
  
• Easier selection of Rubrics & Options: we have simplified the selection process when editing report templates.
  

• Confirmation page when generating reports: we have added an interstitial confirmation page to make the reports generation process smoother.
  

Local Grades: can now be shown alongside IB grades.

GPA Values for Non-IB Classes: have their own settings and can be defined separately from IB classes.

Easier credit adjustments: all classes for a term can now be adjusted from a single page.