January 1, 2017 - My online course for teaching online starts tomorrow.  I sent an email message from my course to the faculty who are students in the course using the Send Email tool.  I set to receive a copy of the email.  When I checked the message in my Gmail account (Saint Mary's is a Google school), I found a question mark symbol "?" stating that Gmail could not confirm that it wasn't spam.  My worry was did the message go through.  I am working with my IT colleagues as well as Blackboard Support to try and find an answer to this issue.  

I reached out to our BbPM but he has not run into the problem before.  I cannot believe we are the first Google school to move to SaaS.

December 29, 2016 - Noticed when using Chrome on a Mac version 55.0.2883.95 I see a small Kaltura icon displaying over top the "normal" content media icon.  This is only appearing in Chrome on a Mac, Chrome on Windows 10, Windows 10 Firefox, Windows 10 Edge and Mac Firefox all display appropriately.

December 23, 2016 - Got a note from our BbPM, the Fall 2016 are now loaded in SaaS.  There were a few duplications so they needs clarification as to which file to load.
I researched and offered to load them myself.

December 22, 2016 - Sent an email to the Faculty about our move to SaaS.  Shared the current url to view courses in SaaS.  I shared a short list of new features.  Received several emails from faculty saying it looked good!

December 20, 2016 Our DBA batch archived our Fall 2016 courses and moved them to a location provided by Blackboard.  Blackboard started working on these courses immediately.  I created a spreadsheet of all the courses we wanted moved.  I cleaned out all course not used.  

December 12, 2016 - The truth of the Release Notes for Q4, 2016

The Release Notes for Q4, 2016, #000042862 posted November 3, 2016 needs work.

Drag/Drop Files is only available in items, assignment files, student submitted assignment files and attachments to weblinks.  It does not work in the following:
blank page
files
discussion threads
blog
journals
wikis
file response in tests

I searched for over a week to find these settings in these tools only to find out they are not currently available.  That is a chunk of time I will never get back.  It would have helped to have had that information posted in the article.


Submission Confirmation Receipts
Students will now get a confirmation receipt number when they have successfully submitted an assignment.  Students can copy and paste the number.  it is important to note that if students do not copy/paste the number, they will not be able to retrieve it later.
Instructors will be able to view the receipts in the GradeCenter view Reports.


Reminders
There is now a generic email an instructor may send to students who are late with an assignment, test, graded something from the GradeCenter.  The problem is the reminder cannot be modified.  It references the Calendar tool which will be a problem for those who do not use the tool.

December 6, 2016 - SSL Certifications for SaaS

Meeting with Lukas, Bb SaaS PM and Steve, our programmer guru to confirm how we re-direct our users from our current self-hosted site to the new SaaS site.  Our current url will need to become an alias when we do the switch on January 6, 2017

Blackboard has to provide the SSL Certificate and Lukas will request those for us.  The certification distributor will then contact us to make sure it is okay to create the certification.