AES Broadcast  01/13/2009          Broadcast  #  2009003 

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 Extended Automated Export System (AES) Maintenance Outages 

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The AES Education Region (shipments for test data) will undergo an 
extended outage for 6 hours beginning at 11:00 PM Eastern Standard Time 
(EST) Saturday, January 24, 2009.  The region will be restored by 
5:00 AM EST Sunday, January 25, 2009. 

The AES Production Region (shipments for live data) will undergo an 
extended outage for 12 hours beginning at 11:00 PM Eastern Standard Time 
(EST) Saturday, February 7, 2009.  The region will be restored by 
11:00 AM EST Sunday, February 8, 2009. 

During these outages, incoming AES shipments will be stored in a queue 
and once the regions are restored processing will continue and messages 
will be returned to the filers.  We strongly encourage you to file your 
shipments prior to these extended outages when possible. 
         
The AES Development Team will be implementing a database feature called 
"Partitioning".  Although this feature will be transparent to the system's 
end-users, it will facilitate the Database Administrator's ability to 
achieve maximum efficiency during regular database maintenance windows. 

AES Filers may submit Non-Licensed shipments under the AES Downtime 
Policy during the AES Production Region outage.  Licensed shipments 
and license exemption shipments must be held until the system is restored 
and an AES Internal Transaction Number (ITN) is received.  Once the 
AES Production Region is restored all AES transactions for 
shipments that moved under the AES Downtime Policy must be filed along 
with any new AES transactions. 
         
If you utilize the AES Downtime Policy for export, please contact the 
port where you will export from. In lieu of the AES Proof of Filing 
Citation, please use the AES Downtime citation which consist of the 
phrase AESDOWN, your individual company's Filer ID, followed by the 
date of export. 

For example:  AESDOWN 123456789 01/01/09 

Please see the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) web site for 
further information on the AES Downtime Policy: 

http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/trade/automated/aes/tech_docs/aestir/june04_intro/ 
       

For further information or questions, contact the U.S. Census Bureau's 
AES Branch at 1-800-549-0595, menu option 1 or at [email protected] 
or online at www.census.gov/trade.