Tuesday, January 25, 2011

NSIPS, Other Tools Offline for Maintenance Upgrade

From Navy Personnel Command Public Affairs Office

MILLINGTON, Tenn. (NNS) -- Navy Standard Integrated Personnel System (NSIPS) and its related tools will be offline for four days beginning the evening of Jan. 27, to implement a major maintenance upgrade.

According to a recent announcement sent out by the NSIPS/Electronic Service Record (ESR)/Career Information Management System implementation (CIMS) manager, affected tools include ESR, Electronic Leave (E-Leave), CIMS and all other tools accessible through NSIPS at https://nsips.nmci.navy.mil. Other NSIPS-accessible tools that will be affected include Navy Retention Monitoring System, Health Professionals Incentive Program, Web Ad Hoc and Analytics.

"The maintenance outage will begin at Central time on Jan. 27, and will run for four days," said Art Tate, NSIPS/ESR/CIMS/NRMS implementation manager, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command Systems Center Atlantic New Orleans Office. "We expect NSIPS and all its related tools to be back online by approximately Central on Jan. 31. As always, we always try to get NSIPS back to operational status even sooner if possible."

According to Tate, the NSIPS home page will be up through most of the maintenance period displaying system status messages.

"For the most part, you'll be able to track the status of the system there, but we expect the home page to be down for a few hours at some point for an update, too," said Tate. "During that time users will get some sort of browser message that the server is unavailable or offline. Just try again a few hours later."

There will be no functional changes from this upgrade.

"When the updated NSIPS comes back online, users will see that there are no functional changes," said Tate. "The only differences will be cosmetic changes to NSIPS – a new look and feel."

E-Leave will be down during the maintenance period, but those who need to request leave will still be able to do so using an alternative method.

"Every command's leave program must continue to function during this outage, so we advised command leave administrators (CLA), reviewers and approvers on procedures to use during down time," Tate said. "Personnel should use the paper 'NC Form 3065 Leave Request/Authorization' to document leave. Once NSIPS is back online the CLA will input the leave request.

"CLAs will also have 'work arounds' for checking personnel out and in on leave, extensions and corrections," Tate said. "Basically they will need to document these items on paper until they can input the information when the system's back online. If they have questions they can contact the NSIPS help desk for assistance."

Those who handle NSIPS transactions, such as command personnel clerks and supervisors, may not receive system feedback as quickly as usual Jan. 27.

"System acknowledgement for transactions submitted Thursday (Jan. 27) will be suspended until the system comes back online Monday (Jan. 31)," Tate said. "Once NSIPS is offline, no transactions or feedback will be possible until it's running again."

Those with questions regarding NSIPS or any of its related tools are encouraged to contact the NSIPS help desk toll-free at (877) 589-5991 or e-mail nsipshelpdesk@navy.mil.

For more news from Navy Personnel Command, visit www.navy.mil/local/npc/.

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