Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: users

  • Open Source Is Not Broken

    Cohen says: Open-source code is generally great code, not requiring much support. So open-source companies that rely on support and service alone are not long for this world. The traditional open-source business model that relies solely on support and service revenue streams is failing to meet the expectations of investors. The whole point is to…

  • User Interface Resigns

    Why did you do it, Flickr? Why? Originally uploaded by issuez Changes to the Flickr home page and Facebook’s overall UI were intended to make them more streamlined. So why is there a vocal rejection of these UI changes? Well, management is focused on attracting new users. In their minds, the people using the system…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • Pointless

    So I wanted to open a support ticket. However, in thinking about what I can ask for the company to do arrayed against what they are willing to offer for support, I realized… I am not going to get a resoultion for the ticket. It is functioning as designed. They are just going to tell…

  • Enrolling Administrators

    One of the challenges of having 42 institutions is managing the administrators. (Actually we created some 12 spare institutions but why is another  post.) So my challenge was how to not drive myself insane trying to enroll the 6 same admin users to each institution. The best way in my opinion is to create the…

  • CE / Vista Undocumented Workspaces

    On the WebCT Users email list (hosted by Blackboard) there is a discussion about a mysterious directory called unmarshall which suddenly appeared. We found it under similar circumstances as others by investigating why a node consumed so much disk space. Failed command-line restores end up in this unmarshall directory. Unmarshalling in Java jargon means: converting…

  • CE/Vista and Banner Integration

    This is the second time I have worked on making Vista integration work with Banner. The first was 2005 in Vista 3.0.3 at Valdosta State. The production here at GeorgiaVIEW was set up by Harold, Jill, and Amy years ago and integrated into the install scripts or part of the cloned databases. So now I…

  • Off the Twitter Timeline: Icons

    I laughed at reading this one. Dear Blackboard: If you include icons in your interface, they should f’ing well be clickable. Everyone but you knows this. jazzmodeus I thought this might refer to the new item icons. Jason works for Emory (doing instructional design) and taking classes at Florida State. Both use Academic Suite. So…