Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Test Server For Blackboard SP11 Is Available

The Plan

We plan to upgrade to Blackboard 9.1 SP11 on June 7th and 8th, with the system hopefully coming up sometime early on Saturday, June 8th. See this previous blog post for more information on this upgrade. Your Blackboard containers will continue to be in the same state they were in before the upgrade after the upgrade is finished. That means the menu will be the same, and all the content you've added to your courses will be the same. So there's nothing really to worry about in that regard. The differences in SP11 mostly involves new functionality.

Test Server Log In

There will be some changes to the look and feel of Blackboard and many new features after the upgrade, so we have installed SP11 on our test server so you can to try it out at http://gcccdtest.blackboard.com. Log in using your usual Blackboard username. Your password will be your birth date unless you've changed it on the test server. As soon as you log in, be sure to change your password by clicking on Personal Information on the TEST Site tab. If you have trouble logging in, please send an email to Rhonda using your campus email account so I can be sure it's you.

Summer and Fall Semester Course Containers

Fall containers will be created on May 1st. It is best to continue to copy and modify your Summer and Fall semester courses on the live server just as you normally would. The test server can be used to experiment with new functionality, but it would be best to do course development on the live server and phase in use of new functionality over time once the live server is upgraded.

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