Another BLE - only 23 Colleges not 5

The City University of New York described their how they upgraded a multi-institutional University to Bb8. This was probably the closest resembling institution to the BLE, so I attended the session to see how they were managing. It was useful; managed to take away some tips - my notes are below.

• 23 schools under one school – CUNY
• ITS is managed centrally, including Bb; Colleges individually manage business cases for other processes
• 140,000 students using Bb6.3
• Snapshot running differently with different databases; administered locally, with individual local business rules
• Hard for students studying across more than 2 Colleges.

• Project objectives
o Consolidated support
o Improved ease of admin

• Domain Architecture – using Community System
o Central admin but still allowing for local identies
o 1 database with a domain for each school;

• Phased approach – some early adopters (small schools) went straight in for v8
• Nov 07 : stakeholders and communication methods established, Bb Contract negotiated
• Roles & Responsibilities set up; project team with reps from each school; project teams in the individual colleges
• Problems – large database led to performance issues, which the service pack 3 fixed; they experienced a number of outages – vendors were engaged to get these things fixed (e.g. SUN)
• Migrated to hosted platform to mitigate risk
• Lessons learned – disaster recovery, testing environment