Welcome

A few weeks ago, salesforce.com hosted its 9th annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, CA. As a premier event for the cloud computing and sales industries, Dreamforce brings today’s technology minds together to provide attendees with the tools and techniques they need to take their businesses to the next level. And just in case you consider conference participation an indicator, you should know that this year Dreamforce had over 45,000 attendees and 270 exhibitors.

Of course, the conference was of particular interest to us as we launched the integration of Salesforce and Blackboard with Blackboard Learn for Sales. Attendees were very excited about the news! They see this new application as a way to not only certify sales reps before they go out and sell, but also as a tool to see greater sales results through a more educated team. Read more about the benefits of Learn for Sales here.

We’ve been talking about ANGEL 8.0 for a while now—since before the merger with Blackboard—and now it’s here.  Yesterday we announced the general availability of ANGEL 8.0.  So, what’s the big deal (when you’ve been told it’s a small update)? There are some big benefits for ANGEL clients who upgrade to ANGEL 8.0.  First, this is the only fully supported ANGEL release with service packs to be planned through the end of life of ANGEL in October 2014.  These service packs will provide continued support of product issues that arise.  ANGEL 7.4 moves to Operational Support in October 2012 at which time no further service packs will be planned, though security vulnerabilities will continue to be resolved on both code lines.

Virtual Career Fair is one of my absolute favorite use cases for Blackboard Collaborate’s breakout rooms.  The following is another of my bright ideas and has happened in my imagination only, so far!  Imagine with me, if you will…you’ve been invested financially, emotionally, educationally and personally in obtaining your degree for 4+ years and graduation is rapidly nearing.  The economy…well the economy sucks!  Word around campus is there are a very limited number of jobs for me in my field and they are hugely competitive given the number of unemployed in my geographic area.

We recently launched the Blackboard Mobile Strategy Series comprising of three online interactive sessions to help institutions develop their own mobile strategy. The series offeres an overview of the current status of mobile usage amongst students and showcases the possibilities that mobile offers to enrich teaching, learning, and campus life. We tapped into resources from the Blackboard Mobile team and were also helped by Jake Gannon from the University of Liverpool.

For those of you who are curious about what the new Institutional Hierarchy feature in Blackboard Learn 9.1 is all about, I wanted to share a short presentation from BbWorld that provides a quick overview. This presentation discusses how Institutional Hierarchy allows you to delegate administrative privileges in a way that parallels your real-world institution. You can view the presentation below. And to learn more about this feature and the many others that are part of the full Blackboard Learn platform with Community Engagement and Content Management, join us for a webinar on Wednesday at 2:00pm Eastern.