The college will be transitioning to Blackboard’s Software as a Service (SaaS) model the week of August 20, 2016. The decision to transition from our current Blackboard (Bb) Learn 9.1 self-hosted environment (housed in HVCC on-campus data centers) was carefully considered and assessed based on the college goals, impact to the campus community, product support and upgrade availability, and budgetary costs (both fiscal and in terms of the personnel resources required to host on-campus). Both the Information Technology Services and Distance and Online Learning offices made a recommendation to move forward with the SaaS Model.
The transition to SaaS will take place in two phases. Phase 1 is taking place this week, with ITS moving the self-hosted (on-campus) environment into Blackboard’s Managed Hosted model. The system is anticipated to be released to the campus community today, May 20, 2016. Phase 2 will be completed the week of August 20, 2016, with the completion of moving from Managed Hosting to SaaS.
What is the difference between the Managed Hosted Model and SaaS?
Managed Hosting: Bb Learn will be hosted in one of Blackboard’s corporate Tier-4 datacenters, providing the campus with a secure, highly scalable and fully managed environment on a 24x7x365 basis. Blackboard updates and patches will still require occasional downtime in this model.
The SaaS Model: Bb Learn will be hosted in Blackboard’s Cloud architecture (AWS), providing the campus with a system that provides all of the above in addition to seamless updates that only require downtime for major version upgrades. With patches and updates applied seamlessly, this model will provide the best possible user experience minimizing any need for downtime.
How will this impact users?
For our end users, the transition will be seamless to the Managed Hosted model this week. We have redirected our url for Blackboard to the managed hosted environment. Therefore, all of your current links and bookmarks will still function.
In August, our transition from Managed Hosted to SaaS will also involve an upgrade to the current version of Blackboard Learn. This will require system downtime from August 20, 2016 through August 25, 2016.
Beginning in June 2016, training and documentation will be developed by the Distance and Online Learning office to provide the campus community with support for the transition to the new version that will be in place for Fall 2016.
Thank you for your support as we make this transition to better serve the campus community.
ITS
Published: Fri, 20 May 2016 14:49:11 +0000 by s.garrand