In the interest of giving you as much advance notice as possible for planning purposes, we would like to let you know about an extended downtime that eRA has currently scheduled for the Memorial Day weekend in May 2014.
All systems, including eRA Commons and ASSIST will be offline while our systems are upgraded and the information in the databases will be converted to support Unicode compatible data.
Unicode is a computing standard that allows systems to handle virtually any type of text expressed in the world's writing systems. As a result of this upgrade, eRA systems will be able to accept Greek characters as they appear in the original scientific text submitted by grantees. For instance, Greek characters will now appear in progress reports without resulting in garbled text.
We will share more details about the downtime in May as the date approaches.