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Round Table

David Schlater (UI CE 8.0.2)

David reported that he cannot seem to resolve the custom log-in page problems. Randy contributed the responses from Bb that custom pages pose problems. The logs for the log-in page can grow very quickly and may be affecting performance. He suspects that it is related to failed authentications. Ticket #574562.

Donna Wicks (Kettering Bb Learn 9 pilot; prod. Bb 8, Academic Suite: Community, Learning, Content)

Part of beta program in fall 2008. Ran beta on their own servers. Will switch to Bb Learn 9 in May. Having gone through beta, heard that that WebCT clients probably should wait for later applicaton packs for Bb Learn 9 or wait for Bb Learn 10. Schema from 8 to 9 has not changed a lot; but the schema change will require a lot of migration. Migration time will be longer then. Bb replaced institution, college, school, department, and course level admin management with something called virtualization. Discussion of support issues that were encountered during the pilot, primarily the state of readiness of Tier One. Randy (IaSt) confirmed that Tier 1 is not ready to support Bb9. In contrast, praised product development response. Recommended that WebCT legacy schools request Admin rights on a Bb hosted pilot site for Bb Learn 9.x. Work flow, administrative processes are different. Discussion of documentation issues followed. Noted that initial documentation is usually sketchy; good documentation depends on users sharing their best practices.

Kathy Saville

No report.

Pete Boysen, Randy Dalhoff (laST, Vista 8.0.1)

Randy reported that the installation guide for Bb9 contained errors. Also, it lacked directions about starting and stopping the application. Finally, it doesn't adequately deal with error messages. Matt reported that the installation guide has been updated and may have resolved some of the issues if not all.

Sam McCool (NLN, Vista 4.2.3)

Reported that when Southerland came on, Tier One changed dramatically - response time was faster and issues were escalated quickly to engineering or programming. If this has changed, especially with taking on a new platform, NLN will be disappointed.

Amita Mahajan (Elmo College, Vista 8.0.2)

Welcomed to the group. Asked the group if the WebCT monitor log stop working. David reported that also and gave his ticket #546990. Reported issues about migrating from CE to Vista and the loss of some Vista tools. Matt commented that Amita should reference the ticket, and it should be referred to Jon Porter's group. Reported that the 8.0.2 has been problematic so far. Reported a problem with CPU activity, as reported previously by Mary Holmes. She reported that garbage collection running okay but having problems with indexing. Donna commented that SoftChalk scorm modules might require that garbage collection be run more often. Main issue is CPU utilization and how to stabilize it.

1. Matt Davis will follow up on the perceptions of Tier One support for Bb 9.
2. Matt will also try to find out how our institution tickets get to VST level.
3. Mary Holmes will send David the Max Perm size from Alam.