Blackboard Service Pack Installation - System Unavailable Jan 1 - 2

Information for Faculty

As you know, Blackboard was upgraded to version 9.1 before the Fall 2010 semester. With it came many changes and several 'bugs'. Several Service Packs have been released by Blackboard to fix some of the known issues we have encountered. We will be installing Service Pack 2 to our Blackboard system starting on January 1st, 2011. Blackboard will be down for 15 - 24 hours during this installation.

Following are some of the issues that were fixed in Service Pack 2:

1. Course Tool links are inconsistently available and unavailable.
2. Documents added by instructors in a Discussion Board thread are not accessible by students.
3. Inconsistent Usage and Tracking Report results for same user
4. Vertical Scroll Bar missing in Grade Center when using IE8
5. If the Course Entry Point is set to Announcements, the banner does not display
6. Initial loading of Course Cartridge fails due to lack of memory.
7. Error opening website links. If an external link is set to "open in a new window", the URL is appended with "&coursetoclabel=[name]/", thereby making the URL unusable.
8. If an Assignment name has a hash symbol (#) in it, a user will encounter a 404 error when attempting to download submissions.
9. In Announcements, when editing a date field manually, an error "The end date cannot be earlier than the start date" would incorrectly be displayed. This did not occur when using the calendar icon to enter or edit a date.
10. Links from courses copied from a prior Blackboard version would dislay either a HTTP 404 or HTTP 403 error.
11. When opening an Office 2007 document in Internet Explorer, Office presents an unnecessary authentication dialog.

After the Service Pack has been installed, there will be a new module "Mobile Learning Update" listed on the 'My eLearning' tab. Courses, content, and organizations can now be accessed on a variety of mobile devices, including Android and Blackberry phones on the Sprint network.

Hopefully this service pack will alleviate some of the bugs that have been encountered during the fall semester. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Thanks.