Dear Colleagues:

The Blackboard Response Team worked through out the day on Saturday on the
two primary activities I explained in my previous message:1) activate the
Online BA program in the hosted environment and 2) copy all our university
Blackboard data on to a physical media storage appliance and transfer it to
the Blackboard, Inc. data center in Virginia.

We are on schedule with the Online BA program and have now made the system
available to the program's user community. There are some issues with a
faculty credentials that we to adjust in the system today. We have been in
contact with the Online BA leadership and coordinating our activities with
theirs to insure a successful transition to the hosted environment.

We are also completing the final steps required to send all the university
data to Virginia. This activity supports the ability to activate the hosted
environment  for all the remaining colleges and programs.  Over 6.5 million
files have been copied and are ready for transfer to Blackboard's hosted
site via a courier service.  Once in Virginia, and barring any
unknown/unexpected issues, the restoration process should take about 24
hours for all the data and system configurations to be loaded.  Many of the
necessary steps to achieve this restoration have already been completed
through the work we did to restore/activate the Online BA program.
We will soon begin to focus our attention on restoring and maintaining the
CUNY Blackboard system.  In the event we are able to provide access to the
system, it will be only as an interim solution and until the hosted
environment is ready.  We also very strongly suggest that users save their
work frequently and avoid if possible from creating any new content which
may not get replicated once we cut over to the hosted environment.

I will continue to keep you informed of progress.

Thank you.
Brian (via Blackberry)