A message from BLACKBOARD COLLABORATE SUPPORT

Blackboard customers and partners,

First, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Mark Strassman and I am the Senior Vice President of Product and Industry Management at Blackboard. My team is responsible for the centralized management our company’s full product portfolio. We help ensure product roadmaps and strategies are aligned and that we are leveraging the full strength of our portfolio in a way that maps our products better to how you use them every day.

I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that over the past few days many of you have been experiencing slowness in our Web conferencing service. I speak for our entire organization when I apologize for any frustration you have felt.

Maintenance was performed in conjunction with bringing up our new North America datacenter resulting in an impact to your service. While intermittent service interruptions are typical of major system conversions, rest assured that through this implementation, we will be even better positioned to provide you with the high-quality service you deserve and to drive greater improvements over the long-term.

The system is currently stable and accommodating peak traffic loads.  The complete investigation of the situation is ongoing and I will continue to openly share information as needed on the root cause and additional safeguards we are putting into place to ensure this does not happen again.  Our team is working diligently to monitor and test the system in order to quickly detect and respond to anything new that might be discovered or reported.

We are also aware that the customer communication process used to notify you of this type of maintenance may not have effectively reached all stakeholders prior to the maintenance window on January 4^th.

I want to assure you that we are fully dedicated to providing you with a Web conferencing service that you can rely on and a responsive customer support experience to address any issues that you or your end users encounter. We recently restructured our organization to centralize all Blackboard products and technical services into a single unit to help us anticipate and respond to your needs more effectively and improve our cloud delivery. Our new and improved datacenter is part of this update. It has an infrastructure that is designed specifically to support student and institutional success and we are excited to provide you with an enhanced cloud environment.

We take our responsibility to facilitate the best education experience possible very seriously and I thank you for your patience. If you have any questions or want to provide feedback directly related to this topic, please feel free to contact me directly at mark.strassman@blackboard.com.

Thank you,

Mark Strassman

Senior Vice President, Product and Industry Management, Blackboard