The University System of Georgia which is made up of 35 public colleges and universities is in the middle of migrating 32 of these schools from Vista 3.07 to Vista 8.x.

In addition to moving our 200,000 plus users and many tens of thousands of course sections to Vista 8, we are also changing our hardware architecture by moving from 4 clustered environments running Vista 3.0.7 to 10 clustered environments running Vista 8.0.2. These were going to be clean installs so installing on top of Vista 3.07 was not an option.   As you can imagine this is no small task and has involved a large amount of planning concerning all aspects of the upgrade.

After our technical team ironed out the details of setting up the new infrastructure, it was time to focus on how to move our large number of course sections and their content to the new environments and to provide training to the local institutional admins and the local faculty. We decided on a phased-in approach - first a small group of six institutions of varying sizes, educational missions, and that utilize Vista for a variety of different use cases (IG1 - Implementation Group 1) to go live in January 2009 and then building on what was learned from the first group, the rest of the twenty-six institutions would migrate (IG2 - Implementation Group 2) for the Fall 2009 term.

We decided to use two different methods for migrating content. First was the old standby method of downloading content in Vista 3.07 and then uploading and re-assembling in Vista 8, taking advantage of the new tools and functions found in Vista 8.  This does have some disadvantages including the amount of time required by faculty to do this work.  We have found there are a large number of our faculty who have chosen this route but for others, they wanted something a bit less time consuming for them.

For the faculty, who wanted something easier, we used a custom built application to move sections from V3 to V8 called the Section Migration Archive and Restore Tool (SMART). This application can be used by instructors or only by the local admins as determined by the local institution.  As of 3/26/2009 we have migrated 3530 sections for both the IG1 and IG2 schools using the SMART tool.

About an equal number of sections have been rebuilt in Vista 8 from content in Vista 3.07.

So far this migration effort has been an astounding success.  Our six institutions that went live this past January are very happy and we are receiving lots of good news from our faculty and students at the schools on how they like Vista 8. 

Much of this success can be traced back to our extensive planning and also to the various communication tools we put in place for this upgrade effort.  Besides our regular listserv for our institutional admins, we also have a weekly webinar for our admins where the past weeks activities are reviewed, the next weeks schedule, and any other item of interest that may come up from our local admins.

However, perhaps the most successful communication tool we have put in place is our wiki where all of our admins from around the state can post any interesting bits of info they have discovered about Vista 8.  Here one can find a known issues list, hey look at this cool thing we figured out you can do and all sort of training materials and documentation that has been created by the local schools and is being shared across the University System.  This has been a very fun (and thankfully non-eventful) ride so far!

I would like to invite your comments on successful strategies for migrating or upgrading Blackboard on your campus.

Next time I will talk about our training efforts for the 32 campuses and their faculty.