Dear Colleagues:
As you know, the CIS team has been working with
Blackboard Inc over the last week to provide the data and configure the system
in their hosted environment. We have been running Blackboard 8.0 at CIS on an
interim basis while this work has taken place. We are now ready to complete the
migration of Blackboard 8.0 to the new environment at the Blackboard hosting
site. As I have noted previously, this hosted Blackboard 8.0 environment was
established by Blackboard to support its customers (including its largest
customers), and Blackboard manages and maintains it on a round-the-clock basis.
To complete
the migration we must schedule a system outage. We are planning to bring down
Blackboard 8.0 on Saturday, May 9 from 5-11 am.
This
maintenance outage is necessary in order to freeze the data, migrate the data to
the new system, test the system, and reenable Blackboard 8.0 in the new
environment. While we have planned for a 6 hour outage on Saturday morning,
when CUNY experiences the lowest usage of Blackboard 8.0, we hope that we can
bring up Blackboard 8.0 in the new environment in even less time.
Blackboard
8.0 will continue to be run in Blackboard Inc's hosted environment until we
determine the root causes of problems with the CIS-hosted environment and can
ensure our ability to operate the system at CUNY in a stable and reliable
manner. I want to assure you that, from the users’ point of view, everything
will look and function as if it were successfully hosted here.
Please let
your campuses know of this planned outage. We will also be posting alerts on
the Blackboard sign-on page and an explanation for the outage on the Blackboard
Unavailable Page on Saturday morning.
Thank you
for your assistance during this transition.
Brian
Cohen
Associate Vice Chancellor and
University CIO