Perceived Negativity about Blackboard

In looking back over my recent blog posts, I can see where someone might get the idea that I think Blackboard is a shifty, evil company. This is far from the case… in fact, I think Blackboard has made huge progress over the past couple years. I thought I’d highlight a few things I think they’ve done right.

Support: Blackboard has, rightfully, earned a reputation for horrible customer support. As a former WebCT campus, the transition period from WebCT support to Blackboard support was awful. Blackboard has acknowledged that mistakes were made and they admit that they mishandled the merger of the two support organizations. Over the past couple years though, they have made great improvements in support (at least from my perspective). Most of our tickets have been resolved. New tickets opened have been addressed quickly and thoroughly. Blackboard support staff have taken to monitoring Twitter, client email lists, and attending the bi-weekly VistaSWAT Wimba sessions and offering assistance directly, if they can, or indirectly, by getting questions to the people who can answer them. There have been several support staff that have been involved in this capacity, but I don’t think any have been more… well… everywhere than John Porter (Senior Manager of Client Support). John has tirelessly worked to turn around the bad feelings that many have had about support, including training for Tier 1, a consistent presence on the WebCT-Users and WebCT-Admins listservs, and a solid effort on Twitter. Within a day of my latest blog postings from the conference, John contacted me about some inaccuracies that he wanted to get cleared up. I’ll be talking to him this week and will certainly be correcting any mistakes I made; but what really impresses me is that he keeps up with what’s out there and spends a significant amount of his time (even on the weekend!) working to create satisfied clients.

Buggy code: The early days of Vista 4.0 were rough and Blackboard ended up taking the brunt of the criticism for the crappy code involved. The reality, however, is that Vista 4.0 was coded by WebCT developers, many of whom were either laid off, or quit, when Blackboard bought the company. This left Blackboard developers with ~50 million lines of code, that they didn’t write, filled with literally thousands of bugs. Anyone who has worked with coding, specifically working on complex code that someone else wrote, can appreciate the magnitude of the task that was finding and correcting the bugs that existed. In my opinion, they’ve done a tremendous job. Some of the earlier service packs and hotfixes were tough and sometimes introduced more serious issues than they corrected, but once we got past application pack 1 things started getting much better. In fact, I can’t think of any upgrades that we’ve applied since app pack 1 that caused any significant issues. Application pack 2 was a huge win, and introduced a level of stability on our system that allowed us to take a deep breath and start focusing our resources on things other than just keeping the system up and running. Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t still issues with the code and things I would change, but the improvement has been dramatic and very welcome, and should be acknowledged.

Migrations: Getting from CE4 to Vista 4 was a challenge. We ended up having to write a bunch of utilities to facilitate the process, and other schools had to spend huge amounts of labor to get files from one system to the other. I was never involved in the Vista 3 to Vista 4 migration, but I’ve heard horror stories about the process. Now, I’m not saying that the new “co-production/learning environment connector” process is perfect, but it’s quite a bit better than anything I’ve seen in the LMS market.  Now, keep in mind that I haven’t actually used the process yet,  but it does look like it will make the experience smoother and less painful than any previous migrations. Now if only Blackboard would stop calling it an “upgrade”….