This week I've been completely engrossed in upgrading Blackboard - our Managed Learning Environment. Our systems engineer (Cameron, for those that know him) did all the serious stuff - making backups, changing Oracle versions etc and actually doing the version stuff. Then he hands over to me to do the customisations and tweak things so it fits our institution and works the way we want it to. We've had a few months of warm-up to this with our test systems, so I really thought I was ready for the live upgrade...and boy was I wrong!
I feel like I've spent the majority of the week doing find-and-replace sql queries on our database.
We tend to try and stretch Blackboard to it's limits - we use html in course menu's and content items, we cross link between areas etc. All this stuff breaks in the upgrade, so figuring out how to change it so it does work without manually editing all 9000+ course areas has been non-trivial.
I won't post the sql queries here for doing this sort of thing, but do shout if you want them.
We're still investigating some issues with our enrollment feeds and trying to optimise performance, but we are now live and commited to Blackboard 9. And I am delighted this week is over!
