Blackboard News from CUNY (03/13/2009)

On Behalf Of Brian Cohen
Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 5:52 PM
To: CUNY-ITSTEER@LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
Subject: Update-Blackboard 8 is online

Dear Colleagues:

I am please to inform you that the Blackboard 8 system has been restored and is now available. Over the past two hours we have monitored the system, observed faculty and staff logging in with no problem, and heard back from faculty confirming the availability of their course materials.

We encourage you to advise your campus community of the system's availability. CIS will be staffing its help desk throughout the weekend (hours of operation to be sent out under separate email) to work with campus help desks should the need arise. In addition, the CIS team will monitor the system throughout the weekend and keep in close contact with Sun Microsystems engineers. Please note that your users may experience some system slowness / loading of screens as the system runs and builds the application cache in memory. This will resolve itself rather quickly.

I would like to thank Associate Provost Manfred Kuechler, Professor Sylvie Richards and Dean George Otte for their guidance, assistance, and testing of the recovered system. Their partnership with the CIS team reflects the deep commitment at CUNY in serving the core academic mission of the University.

We look forward to continued system stability and will use the time over the next weeks and months to put in place an interim and a long term Disaster Recovery program that will allow us to avoid or recover immediately from any catastrophic failures in the future.

Finally, the CIS team greatly appreciates the notes of support and offers of assistance. While we have spent endless hours over this past week recovering from this failure, we did so out of our sincere commitment to the students and faculty of this University.