Blackboard upgrade programme

Posted on: 07 Feb 2017

As the Blackboard maintenance and upgrade schedule shows, we have a limited number of opportunities during the academic year in which we can carry out major upgrades. We want to maximise what can be accomplished at each opportunity, so that staff and students will be able to take advantage of new features as they become available.

Since migrating to managed hosting in August 2016 we have applied a number of upgrades to ensure that we always remain well within Blackboard's official support parameters and that staff and students benefit from new features and bug fixes.

Each new release is tested on our staging instance of Blackboard which is separate from our live Blackboard (production). Upgrades are then tested generally and against staff and student managed desktops.

STATUS
10 December 2018	Staging instance has been upgraded and is now at Release Q2 2018 CU4.
5 January 2019	ODL has evaluated the changes and assessed the impact of updates to Blackboard components and is satisfied that the upgrade will have minimal impact for staff and students. ODL has completes testing on the student desktop and will continue testing against the staff managed desktop.
21 January 2019	Blackboard will be unavailable on Monday 21st January 2019 to allow production upgrade to Q2 2018 (CU4).
PRODUCTION
	Version	Pending	Scheduled
26 August 2018	Q2 2018 (CU2)	Upgrade: Q2 2018 (CU4)	21st January 2019
STAGING
	Version	Pending	Scheduled
10 December 2018	Q2 2018 (CU4)	Finalised ODL testing

Glossary
B2	Building block. These are considered maintenance updates and will be scheduled for one of the weekend overnight slots when necessary.
CU#	Cumulative update, or patch
SaaS	Software-as-a-Service (cloud services)