Bb List Members,
I just wanted to touch base with a status report on the Blackboard Learn upgrade. We are scheduled to make courses.miami.edu available again to all users around noon on Saturday, January 6, 2018.
We are currently doing final acceptance testing of the system. We are being assisted by a great acceptance team made up of instructional designers. They are each reviewing the courses they developed for their programs. We hope that they will identify any final issues that might exist. If we don't find any show-stoppers, we will take final possession of the system on Friday afternoon so that we can finish our configuration steps. If we do find any major issue we will bring up the old system and use it again this semester. That is unlikely, but still possible.
We had hoped to have the new Blackboard Learn system online around January 1, 2018. Two issues were encountered during the upgrade that delayed the release date.
At the start of the upgrade, a step that was expected to take one hour took 39 hours to complete. (tl;dr) This step moved old files from the course file system into the newer Content System. The delay was attributed to the fact that we had more old files stored in courses than expected and a number of the files were huge video files that locked up the process. After many restarts the problem completed successfully.
After the upgrade steps were completed, the system was running much slower than expected. (tl;dr) After a number of days of investigation, Blackboard found and corrected the problems and returned the system to normal response times. To fix the problem they resized the system and added some missing indexes to the database.
Rick, Brett, and I are continuing to investigate minor issues. There are no major issues outstanding at this time, but we want to give the acceptance team through Friday morning to see what they encounter.
We apologize for the lengthy outage. We know how many people have come to depend on Blackboard being available. Hopefully, this move from a Managed Hosting to a Cloud Hosting solution will mean that our system will remain current with the latest features that Blackboard has developed, and will not require any further upgrade outages of days at a time. Our goal is to make the technology as invisible as possible. You expect it to be there and it is. Our goal is to be available to answer questions and assist you when you run into trouble using the system. We are looking forward to a productive 2018.
