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March Madness 2012 is upon us! With 99% of the tournament teams using Blackboard, we decided to host our own Final Four Pool. No money involved just good, clean fun. The client with the closest entries for the final winner will win a non-transferable free pass to BbWorld 2012 in New Orleans, LA.

Whether you’re pulling for a Trojan or a Jayhawk, you must enter your final four bracket picks by 12PM EDT on March 22, 2012 – and hopefully we’ll see your team in the Final Four.

Click here to enter your picks and be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more March Madness trivia! Please see the contest terms and conditions,  for more information.

We’re thrilled to reveal that Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, President of UMBC, will deliver the BbWorld 2012 opening keynote on Tuesday, July 10. In 2008, Freeman was named one of America’s Best Leaders by U.S. News & World Report, which in 2009, 2010, and 2011 ranked UMBC the #1 “Up and Coming” university in the nation.  In 2011, U.S. News also ranked UMBC 4th nationally for “Best Undergraduate Teaching” – tied with Yale.  In 2009, TIME magazine named him one of America’s 10 Best College Presidents. This past year, he received both the TIAA-CREF Theodore M. Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence and the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Academic Leadership Award, recognized by many as the nation’s highest awards among higher education leaders.  Also in 2011, he was named one of seven Top American Leaders by The Washington Post and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. … yeah. We’re blown away by him too! Not familiar with Freeman’s work? don’t worry! You will be an expert by July with all the exclusive updates we have to share with you. Stay tuned! For all our opening keynote contest participants, if you guessed Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, you’re ONE Step closer to joining us at BbWorld 2012 for FREE! Our officials are in the process of collecting all eligible posts and we will be revealing the lucky winner this Wednesday, March 14th at NOON sharp!

Did you know that SP8 was shaped by nearly 600 institutions through their participation in Blackboard Community Programs?  The amount of client participation with this release was so impressive, we put together our first ever report on how clients directly impacted the development process of SP8. Full of statistics, client insight and information about the various programs, it provides a clear view of how clients impact Bb Learn every step of the way.  Read it today – SP8: Client Impact on Functionality & Design.  Not sure how this report can help you? No problem.  Based on initial feedback from clients in the Blackboard Idea Exchange, we have complied the top four ways you can leverage this report at your campus or organization: 1.)    Increase confidence in upgrading to SP8 – even if you were not one of the 600 clients involved in providing direct feedback on the product, I am completely confident there is an institution just like yours that was. Through our programs individuals with similar perspectives and challenges have worked with our designers and developers ultimately impacting the way new features were built. 2.)    Generate excitement, awareness and confidence among faculty.  Peter DiFalco from CSU Chico participated in SP8 community programs and is featured in the report.  He will be distributing it to faculty so they “will be more confident to try new features knowing that the staff who support them advocated on their behalf for higher quality, efficiency, and reliability.” 3.)    Inform your users about the various Blackboard community programs that are available. They too can impact a future release.  We solicit participation from system administrators, educators, instructional designers and students – it is a great way to encourage adoption. 4.)    Show it to high level Academic and IT leadership at your institution to demonstrate how Blackboard is openly working with hundreds of organizations like yours on the development and refinement of Blackboard Learn. If you weren’t one of the 600 clients that shaped SP8 learn more about the ways you can impact a future release at blackboard.com/empower.  Start by signing up for the Blackboard Idea Exchange today.  We have programs that range in commitment level and touch every phase of the software development life cycle – there is a program for everyone!

As many of you are aware Service Pack 8 for Release 9.1 debuted a few weeks ago. Since December I have been working with about 100 clients who have been testing Service Pack 8.  These clients have been working in the product, testing the upgrade and piloting it with their users so they have a very clear sense of what this Service Pack means in terms of how it will impact their users. Chris Bray, Blackboard Administrator from University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, and I spent some time discussing Service Pack 8 last week.

Chris Bray, University of Arkansas

Overall how do you feel about the upgrade process to SP8?

We participated in the SP8 upgrade experience beta and have been running SP8 on a test server for a couple of months now. I upgraded my pre-production/test environment from SP7 HF1 to the GA version of SP8 on February 8th. The upgrade process went really well, and I’ve been making my own notes of what I’ve done after the upgrade that’s different than my usual upgrades.  I have my notes and a number of other resources for myself and my team at http://bbadmin.uark.edu/sp8 . This page might be helpful for other clients investigating SP8 and planning their upgrade. The only difference from other upgrades I see is tweaking some settings in order to use the new SP8 functionality. I scrapped my previous theme customizations in favor of the Bb Learn ‘2012 theme’, which is what we started calling the new SP8 theme on the beta. I’m still researching and working on some items but pretty excited about the possibilities with SP8.