As outlined in the previous post, one of the themes which formed part of the discussion about the process of upgrading to Learn 9 was Infrastructure. This did not receive a lot of interest on the day. This may have been because of the audience and the fact that it is probably not the foremost element of the decision process. However, it does need to be considered carefully, especially by customers currently using the Campus Edition or Vista products because Learn 9 is based on Tomcat technology (rather then WebLogic). Some of the issues involved are:
- update to Tomcat 6 (which may have subtle implications especially for Building Block developers)
- supported combinations of application and database servers
- different port numbers used have implications for firewall settings
- changes to client requirements: supported browsers, versions of Java
- database size and file space requirements
- scripts for synchronising data with other systems
Blackboard has some useful documentation in the Reference Center and Knowledge Base (accessible from Behind the Blackboard) to get customers started with some of these issues; for example:
- Virtualizing the Blackboard Reference Architecture
- Sizing Guides for Dell and Sun hardware
- Optimizing Blackboard Learn Deployments
- Setup Guide
- Advanced Integration and Data Management
- Supported browser information
and also check out the webinars being run by the Bb 9 Upgrade Team.
If you have any comments, questions or issues to raise about this aspect of the Learn 9 upgrade decision process feel free to add a comment to this post or send me an email. Scot-BUG plans to collate views from the community and pass them on to Blackboard to assist with their prioritisation and deployment processes.
Stephen Vickers