Hi, I’m Patrick Ryan. As the Technology Analyst in Blackboard Product Development I am responsible for maintaining our technology policy. Our technology stack includes everything from browsers to databases to internal components. Keeping Blackboard current with the changing technology landscape is my priority. I work to keep clients in the loop about our policies, levels of support, future intentions, and current supported technologies. I am part of a Product Development team that works hard year round to keep up with the latest versions of operating systems and browsers so that you, the user, can have a seamless experience from release to release.
As
you may know, Windows 7 is right around the corner. Microsoft has announced that the newest
Windows operating system will become generally available on October 22nd
of this year. Many of our clients are
already asking questions like: “Are you already testing Windows 7?” and “When
will you support Windows 7?”. I have good
news for you.
Blackboard
Product Development has had a release candidate of Windows 7 for some
time. As with any new technology, we
started testing it on our current products as soon as we could. We ran tests against our Blackboard Learn
product line as well as the Vista/CE product and ANGEL Learning products. While these applications are inherently
“browser-based” it does not mean that operating systems don’t matter! Our tests targeted so called “touch points”
of the application, or areas that are most likely to be affected by a new
operating system. This provides us with
the best insight into the performance and compatibility of Windows 7.
After
Microsoft launches Windows 7 in October, the latest version of all our current
products will be considered to be in “Provisional” support. We are
currently planning to be Compatible with all future releases of Vista, Angel
and Blackboard Learn by 2010. You may be wondering what this means and how it
fits in to our traditional levels of support. We have three major levels: Provisional, Compatible, and Certified.
- Provisional means that Client Support will accept
issues regarding the final build of Windows 7 and consider them for
inclusion in the next release.
- Compatible technologies have gone through targeted
testing prior to a Blackboard release and are considered safe for use.
- Certified technologies have been generally available
with enough time to fully test them across the entire application. They are generally free of all known
critical and high issues.
In 2010, Blackboard will ship our service packs with
Certified support for Windows 7. But like I mentioned above, it is our
plan that each of our product lines will already have Compatible support before
the end of the year.
To
illustrate our process I would like to take the example of Microsoft Internet
Explorer 8. Internet Explorer 8 was
released in late March of 2009. We were
already testing it on our products which enabled us to ship Blackboard Academic
Suite 8.0 Service Pack 5 with Compatible support in April. This was less than a month after the release
of Internet Explorer 8. Our very next
release, Blackboard Learn 9.0 Service Pack 1, had fully Certified support for
Internet Explorer 8 in June. It is
important to note that while we are making efforts to support the latest
technologies, our Certified and Compatible levels of support are fundamentally
release-driven. In order gain the
benefits of our testing efforts your installation should be up to date. To see more detailed information on our
current support for Internet Explorer 8 and our planned support for Windows 7,
please see the Student and
Faculty Support Resource Center on the Support Wiki.
We may make statements regarding our product development and service offering initiatives, including the content of future product upgrades, updates or functionality in development. While such statements represent our current intentions, they may be modified, delayed or abandoned without prior notice and there is no assurance that such offering, upgrades, updates or functionality will become available unless and until they have been made generally available to our customers.
