Turns out that most of the building block configuration worries were actually non-issues. Because we aren’t truly “migrating” our content from the local system to the MH one, we can get away with configuring all the B2s as wholly new environments, and the publishers and other vendors may need to make some changes after our live courses have launched. This is truly good, and makes me feel that much better about the decision to start with new semester content only on the new system.

It also amuses me how often the Bb techs have tried to blame something on “the content you migrated”; we get to respond along the lines of “oh, you mean the total lack of content we migrated, yeah that could be a real source of trouble.” It sure would be nice if more techs would ask for details BEFORE trying to lay blame on events that may never have actually occurred.

The Summer 2014 courses are already ready on our MH system, and instructors are going in and prepping course content. There’ve been a few bizarre issues that have cropped up (like when one evening we lost the ability to add or edit Items, or see content areas containing content) but working with the MH tech team is a fairly easy experience. Of course the real test will be when students start accessing the courses, and even that we’ve lucked into a sort of “soft launch” with; there are a few intersession courses starting May 20, then the six and eight week courses starting June 23. Of course the true load on the system won’t hit until August, when Fall kicks off, but by then we’ll have several months of live use.

The internal confusion factor is high for me right now, though. When someone asks for Blackboard assistance, I’ll sometimes have to pause for up to a minute before knowing which of our systems to go to. (We’ve got local production, MH production, local sandbox, and MH test systems; it just gets excessive, ya’ know?)

Perhaps it’s true that “the road goes ever on, and on” but this particular branch of the road, to Managed Hosting, is almost at an end. Hooray!