Fall 2007 Courses Created

The Fall 2007 courses will be created over the Memorial Day weekend. The process will start on Saturday morning (05/26/2007). This initial course creation for Fall 2007 will create just over 5,600 courses in Blackboard.

Bb Upgrade to 7.1 Complete

On Tuesday May 22nd and Wednesday May 23rd Maricopa's Blackboard was upgraded from Bb7.0 to Bb7.1. This upgrade was completed ahead of schedule.

The upgrade includes backend infrastructure changes in additon to the upgrade of Bb itself.

• Installed new hardware for the file servers
• Installed a new more robust file system (allows the file store to be grown more easily)
• Setup file replication to almost instantly copy all uploaded file to a different EVA
• Increased the size of the file store on the EVA by about 200GB
• Updated the firmware in the EVA disk drives
• Applied OS and security patches to all Blackboard servers
• Moved some of the Bb web/app servers to a different switch (adds redundancy & reduces risk of downtime)
• Upgraded Bb to the latest build of Version 7.1 (7.1.467.28)
• Configured Bb to use a new e-mail relay server (sysmail2)

MCC Interested in Using Bb for OE/OE Courses

In the past couple of days both Clyde and Randy have received calls from Mesa Community College saying that they are interested in using Blackboard for their Open Entry/Open Exit courses that had been delivered using MIDAS. This information was passed onto Steve and Darrel. Darrel is negoiating the new license agreement with Bb that would have been for all of the colleges except Rio and Mesa. Both Mesa and PC are WebCt users, PC is just beginning their migration from WebCt to Maricopa's Blackboard.

MIDAS Update - Rio off of MIDAS

On May 21, 2007 Clyde Resendez e-mailed Angela Ambrosia (and others) at Rio because he noticed that Rio had not been sending grade interface data from MIDAS to SIS. Later that day Angela responded that Rio is now completly off of MIDAS.

Bb 7.3 Rumored to be Released Summer 2007

Today our Blackboard Technical Service Engineer told Dave Fraedrich that he has heard that Bb 7.3 will be released in Summer 2007. If true, the timing of this release should allow Maricopa enough time to evaluate Bb7.3 in preparation of the May 2008 upgrade. If Blackboard follows their normal maintenance schedule, SP1 for Bb7.3 would be released near the end of 2007 or early in 2008. After testing Bb7.3 the Blackboard Alliance will then be able to decide what to include in the May 2008 upgrade: Bb7.2 or Bb7.3 and possibly the Content System.

At this time we do not know what new features will be included in Bb7.3. I expect that there will be a lot of discussion and possibly demos of Bb7.3 at the Blackboard "Bb World" user conference in July 2007.

BbTest Environment "Dry Run" of May Upgrade Complete

The BbTest environment, which contains the recent restore of Bb Production data, has been upgraded from Bb7 SP1 HotFix 4 (7.0.404.41) to Bb 7.1 SP1 HotFix 3 (7.1.467.28). This upgrade using the restored production data is a test or "Dry Run" of the May upgrade scheduled for May 22nd & May 23rd.

Bb Production Data Restored to BbTest Environment

In preparation for the Bb upgrade in May production databases and course content files have been resored to the BbTest environment. This environment has been tested and appears that the "recovery" has been successful.

BbDev2 Environment Upgraded

The BbDev2 devlopment environment has now been upgraded to: Bb 7.1 SP2 Hotfix 3 (7.1.467.28)