Publication Date: October 25, 2007

Author: William Leith, Acting General Manager, Application, Operations and Delivery Services, Federal Student Aid

Summary: Required EDconnect v7.2 Upgrade

Posted on 10-25-2007

The U.S. Department of Education is pleased to announce the availability of EDconnect, version 7.2 and corresponding documentation. This information will be available on the Federal Student Aid Download (FSAdownload) Web site, located at http://fsadownload.ed.gov by October 30, 2007.

We are in the process of relocating the data center that supports numerous Federal Student Aid systems and Web sites. This change will require a new IP address for SAIG Mailbox transmissions. Due to a change in the IP address that EDconnect uses to send and receive files, users of previous versions of EDconnect must install or upgrade to EDconnect 7.2 by March 1, 2008 or they may be unable to send and receive files.

EDconnect 7.2 is available on the FSAdownload Web site (http://fsadownload.ed.gov) as a single downloadable file, EDconn720.exe, and in eight separate smaller files that can be downloaded to a central location. See the Installation Guide for EDconnect 7.2 for detailed installation information, which is also available on the FSAdownload web site.

EDconnect 7.2 can be installed as an upgrade to version 7.0 or version 7.1 but not as an upgrade to earlier versions of EDconnect. Users of EDconnect 6.X or earlier must perform a Local Install for stand-alone installations or a Network Install followed by a Workstation Install for network installations. Users of EDconnect 7.0 or 7.1 can perform a Local Install - Custom for stand-alone installations or a Workstation Install for network installations.

You are required to have Windows 2000 or Windows XP Home or Professional as your workstation operating system in order to run EDconnect 7.2. The U.S. Department of Education has not approved EDconnect 7.2 for use with Microsoft’s Windows Vista.

Firewalls that have been modified to allow EDconnect to communicate using the fixed IP address utilized by previous versions of EDconnect will need to be updated to use the URL “saigmailbox.ed.gov” instead. The port EDconnect uses, port 26581, has not changed.

If you have any questions about the information contained in this document, contact CPS/SAIG Technical Support at 800/330-5947 (TDD/TTY 800/511-5806), or by e-mail at CPSSAIG@ed.gov.