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Road to Bb Managed Hosting – Finale

I’m going to go ahead and call it – we are now on Managed Hosting.

I can tell because when faculty contact me they have started referring to “the old Blackboard system” as our still-functioning self-hosted environment, while the MH-hosted environment is simply “the Blackboard system.” Although my old system will still be up until June 15, 2014, the primary focus of faculty is now on the Summer and Fall course sites, all living on the new system. The only reasons for anybody to go to the old system are to grab out course Export files, or check on Spring 2014 grades… and even the grade issue is nearly over, as final grades ought to all be submitted at this point.

I will say that I keep running across unexpected difficulties with the MH system. For example, file uploads (whether using the Import Package tool or simply attaching a file to an Item) take what seems like a horrid amount of time complete the upload process. Apparently while on the local-hosted system we were all spoiled for upload speeds. Also, I never did get our local-hosted system up to SP14, which I am now very glad of. I’ve already got an upgrade to the “April release” version scheduled in mid-August, and I will be delighted to leave SP14 in the dust.

Palomar followed an atypical path to get to Manged Hosting; no migration of old courses and users, no attempts to continue supporting legacy data integration methods, no attempt to retain the old DNS listing; but each of these has ultimately worked out as a positive in the long run. In a couple weeks I get to finally shut off our local-hosted system, and within a year I expect that most faculty won’t even recall there was an old system.