From: Brian Cohen
  Sent: 05/04/2009 11:37 PM EDT
  To: "Chief Academic Officers" <CAO@LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU>; "BB Admin Listserv" <CMS-ADMIN@LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU>;  ....
  Subject: Blackboard 8.0 Status Update

Dear Colleagues:

Now that CUNY's data has been delivered to Blackboard, Inc in Virginia the CIS team has been working with the company to configure the system in their hosted environment. While at this point most of the work required is Blackboard's responsibility, we continue to remain available to support the effort. 

The CIS team has also re-focused it's attention to restoring the Blackboard 8.0 system located at CIS, but for interim use only.  We hope to make the system available tonight.  In addition, CIS is working to provide the Blackboard administrators with secure access to data that faculty have not been able to access since the system's failure occurred.

In spite of the instability of our system, it is our intent to provide faculty and students with as much access as possible both to retrieve/copy data and complete assignments.  Since we cannot guarantee how long the system will remain available or stable, we have enabled a data replication process between CUNY and the hosted environment.  This replication process means that changes made to the data during this time should be automatically synchronized with the data we sent to Blackboard over the weekend.  However, please understand that we have not been able to test or validate this synchronization process since the hosted system is not yet completed.  We therefore strongly urge all our users to save and copy, both in the system and locally, any changes made to any existing or new Blackboard content during this interim period.

I will continue to keep the University community informed of progress.

Brian Cohen
Associate Vice Chancellor and University CIO
City University of New York