Event: REDCap Scheduled Downtime and Upgrade

Date/Time: Wednesday, November 6^th, 2024, 5PM-7PM CST

Website: https://redcap.uchicago.edu

Reason: The REDCap application will be upgraded to a newer version of the software.

Who Is Affected: All University of Chicago REDCap users, including non-UChicago external collaborators, mobile app users, API users, survey participants.

Impact: REDCap will be unavailable during this downtime. Unavailability is defined as:

• Survey emails and Alerts & Notifications will be halted until the upgrade is complete.
• Survey links will be inaccessible and will display a ‘REDCap is offline’ message when clicked on.
• API activity will be halted until the upgrade is complete.
• Mobile app users are strongly encouraged to sync any data on their devices back to their REDCap project before the upgrade begins. Although not recommended, offline data collection may continue in the app during the upgrade, however the online sync process will not be available until the upgrade is complete.

Updates: A message will be posted on the REDCap login page confirming the upgrade’s completion, along with details of the newest features and improvements.

Questions? Please email REDCap Support.

The following is a summary of improvements being made on Wednesday, October 16th, 2024 for the handling of outgoing REDCap email messages.  There will be no application downtime needed for these improvements, as they will happen on REDCap’s back-end email message handling setup.

All University and UCMC REDCap users including external collaborators who send email messages within REDCap will be affected. This includes email messages sent as part of:

• Survey Invitations (both manual and automated, and reminders)
• Alerts & Notifications
• Survey Confirmations

The need for these improvements comes from email providers blocking emails whose ‘From:’ address does not match the domain name of the REDCap server (e.g., sending an email from user@uchospitals.edu from the server https://redcap.uchicago.edu). The following email address domains are now permitted to send email messages from our REDCap server, therefore, no blocked messages should occur going forward:

• uchicago.edu
• uchospitals.edu
• uchicagomedicine.org
• bsd.uchicago.edu
• (department).bsd.uchicago.edu
• dacc.uchicago.edu
• radonc.uchicago.edu
• ingalls.org
• chapinhall.org

All other email address domains (not in the list above) will have no-reply-redcap@uchicago.edu as the ‘From:’ address (although the message will still have the ‘Reply-To’ value as the sender). This piece will mostly affect, for example, multi-site studies where external collaborators (e.g., Rush, Mayo, etc) are sending email messages from within UChicago REDCap projects.

Lastly, as a general rule to improve email delivery to inboxes, please refrain from sending email messages from external email accounts (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) and instead always use an institutional email address.

Questions? Issues? Please email REDCap Support.