SEVIS Release 6.22 Planning Guide

Last updated: March 31, 2020

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System Unavailability
Functionality in the Release
Release Resources
Systems Affected by the Outage
School Recertification
Batch Users

Scheduled Release Date: Friday, August 21, 2015

Outage Begins	Outage Anticipated End Date
8 PM (EST) Friday, August 21, 2015	12:01 AM Saturday, August 22, 2015

This release contains minor improvements to SEVIS and fixes some issues associated with SEVIS Release 6.21.

Functionality	Affects F/M SEVIS	Affects J SEVIS	Affects Batch
Redesign of the Listing of Schools page	Yes	No	No
Selection of school and campus persists when return to Listing of Schools page after taking action in SEVIS	Yes	No	No
Ability to do a wildcard search on Given Name	Yes	Yes	No
Improved search speed on exchange visitor and dependent searches	Yes	Yes	No
Increase RFI comments from SEVP to 10,000 characters	Yes	No	No
Description of “Other” Level of Education prints on Form I-20	Yes	No	No
Removal of 500-record limit on report of nonimmigrants whose names were changed by SEVIS	Yes	Yes	No
Provide DSO ability to update OPT employer information when DSO-Recommended OPT End date is in the past, but Actual OPT End Date is in the future	Yes	No	No
Change Batch transaction log so returned addresses are broken down by address field	Yes	Yes	Yes

The following resources are available to support this release:

SEVIS 6.22 Pre-Release Webinar recording (Resource outdated)
SEVIS 6.22 Pre-Release Webinar Slides (Resource outdated)
SEVIS 6.22 Pre-Release Webinar FAQ (Resource outdated)

Note: These links have been disabled. You can visit the SEVIS Webinar page for all release webinars.

SEVIS data is used by many systems worldwide. The following processes and systems will be affected:

Process/System	Effects
I-901 (SEVIS) Fee	The I-901 System will not be able to process the SEVIS fee payments. Students and exchange visitors must either pay ahead of time or wait until SEVIS is online again.
Social Security Numbers (SSN) (System: SAVE)	The Social Security Administration should not be affected.
SAVE (Systems: ESB, PCQS)	SAVE Agents should not be affected. E-Verify
E-Verify (Systems ESB, PCQS)	E-Verify should not be affected.
Visa Applications (System: CCD)	Consular officers at U.S. embassies and consulates should not be affected.
Ports of Entry (Systems: ADIS, PCQS)	Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Officers performing primary inspections can verify admissibility using information that is up-to-date. Anyone seeking F, M, or J status may be sent to secondary inspection for processing. CBP Officers in secondary inspection cannot access SEVIS to verify F, J, or M nonimmigrants’ SEVIS status. However, this is a short outage with very limited effects.
State Departments of Motor Vehicles (DMV) (System: SAVE)	DMV agents should not be affected

There should be no effect on schools’ ability to file for recertification.

Schools and sponsors that use third-party software to push data to SEVIS must plan their batch uploads carefully.

Critical Date/Time	What Happens
8:00 PM Friday, August 21, 2015	SEVIS batch functionality is suspended.
12:01 AM Saturday, August 22, 2015	SEVIS batch functionality is restored.

Transaction logs and PDFs of forms not downloaded by 8:00 PM (EST) Friday, August 21, 2015 will be available for download once SEVIS access is restored.

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