Hello Phil,
We used the import export tool last year to migrate from version 6.3 to 7.0. We found the tool worked quite well for the most part. We had two versions of Blackboard running for a little while side by side, while we transferred the data from one server to another. We did the transfer in a few stages while our main system was live. We exported about 250 courses overnight and then imported then in the morning starting around 8am which took around two to two and a half hours and about the same to import. The users were briefed in advance that the system may be slightly slow in the morning but this was not really noticed. This process was repeated 7 times to make sure all of the 1000+ courses we had at the time migrated successfully.
Problems we had are as follows:
Big courses over 750 meg would archive but would not restore properly. Had to conduct manual restores using Firefox but ones over 1.5 Gb would not restore.
Had issues with illegal characters within courses. We found if a discussion board entry had an illegal Unicode character not recognised by the system it would fail to export. The character had to be located and deleted before it would allow export. The character usually showed up as a and was mainly caused by a Unicode ' pasted in from Microsoft Word.
Also had problems with drop box submissions losing their date, announcements appearing which has been made unavailable in a previous version of BB (5.x I think) and some users getting their user accounts duplicated but having a 1 added to their username. For example: sammcfarlane would get recreated as sammcfarlane1. This only really applied to users who had a system role.
This tool saved us so much time and allowed for a successful migration from one system to another.
Hopefully this helps you.
Regards
Sam
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Sam McFarlane
Blackboard & Learning Technologies Administrator
Canterbury Christ Church University
[e]Blackboard queries: [log in to unmask]
[e]Other queries:[log in to unmask]
[t]Telephone number: 01227 782940 ext. 3105
-----Original Message-----
From: Blackboard/Courseinfo userslist [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Smith, Philip
Sent: 25 May 2007 09:24
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Import Export Tool
Hi
We are looking at using the import export tool to archive courses from Blackboard - currently on v6.3 moving to v7.x
Could anyone give me an indication from their experiences, the reliability of the tool and also a *rough* idea of courses archived per hour and what sort of load/strain it puts on the server?
Many Thanks
Phil
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Philip Smith
LIS Officer
Learning Technology Development Unit
St Martin's College
Bowerham Road
Lancaster
LA1 4JD
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