Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: issues

  • Open Response To Bb ACSS

    17. What is the single most important thing Blackboard can do to create a better client experience for your institution? Provide successful workarounds or bug fixes to the identified issues in a timely manner. A timely manner means within 5 days to the user and 180 days to me. By the end of 5 days,…

  • Fine Print

    One of the employees at Last Resort Grill was mutually entertaining a toddler. Overheard her talking about it, “He’s totally flirting with me.” I found it funny. When she happened by my table, I asked her about it. She said entertaining the kids is part of the fine print of the job. Additionally, people have…

  • MH Operations

    We have been getting these messages for months. Some good folks at Blackboard have caused them to stop for a while, but they just resume. Probably it is multiple cases of the same issue. LDAP Issues: Dear Valued Customer, The MH Operations team has determined that your MH application server(s) are not able to communicate…

  • Recap of Vista Stuff

    It has been a hectic week. A recap… Java certificate fix – Yesterday, August 23rd, the certificate distributed in various Java applets expired. The community discovered the issue and informed Blackboard who put out a fix for the more current products on August 15th. Many customers are leery of having such little lead time to…

  • Less Is More

    Mashable has an interesting article about why Twitter persists despite frequent performance issues: “Less is more. Simplicity is power.” By providing little more than an API, upon which numerous others have built tools, it doesn’t so directly compete with other services. I wonder if perhaps this is the right approach for a learning system? One…

  • Confidentiality

    A student wants Blackboard Vista to not reveal his or her last name. The student has already gone to the Registrar and gotten a confidentiality flag placed on the record. As I understand it, this flag in Banner is a FERPA protection to prevent the record from being provided to parties external to the university.…

  • Shoghi Effendi Internet Quote

    Many Baha’is hold this quote predicts the creation of the Internet. A mechanism of world inter-communication will be devised, embracing the whole planet, freed from national hindrances and restrictions, and functioning with marvelous swiftness and perfect regularity. — Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha’u’llah, p. 203 Perhaps what we know as the Internet is…

  • Ticket Inbox Zero

    Blackboard implemented a ranking system to determine the priority of support tickets. This effort uses criteria like the age and recency of updates to ensure the attention of Technical Support Managers. Certainly this initiative is due to continuing customer complaints about languishing tickets. Last spring we saw a similar push to fix support. We have…

  • Upgrade, Upgrade, Upgrade

    Be more secure! Upgrade today. Want better functionality? Upgrade today. Save a developer! Upgrade today. The save a developer thing is the impetus for this post. The upgrade today mantra annoys me. Software rarely spends enough time in alpha and beta cycles to to identify all the issues. People have been so burned by using…