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Catching up with the lists after a week’s leave… At City College Norwich we’re in the same situation as Jon at Keele; I tend to keep to the latest SPs, and as such upgraded to the April 2014 release on 15th July. The upgrade was more complex than usual due to the removal of IIS fronting (I had to put this back for our authentication). And as Jon said there seems to be more issues with this release than SP14 last year, but it’s still good to introduce the latest features for our academics. I’m currently working with Bb support to resolve an issue whereby the temp DB grows significantly (we’re a self-hosted Windows shop). We’ve had similar problems for the past two years post-upgrade, but we’re not sure what’s causing this year’s problem as yet. On arrival back from holiday this morning I was greeted with a 65GB tempdb.mdf file…is anyone else experiencing this on the April 2014 release? Best Chris From: Blackboard/Courseinfo userslist [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tyrone Knight Sent: 31 July 2014 15:43 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: To upgrade, or not to upgrade Hi all, Thank you again for your feedback, I think I am going to leave the upgrade as planned then. Many thanks Ty From: Blackboard/Courseinfo userslist [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jonathan Knight Sent: 31 July 2014 13:40 To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: To upgrade, or not to upgrade Hi Tyrone, At Keele we're self hosted and we tend to move to the latest stable release of Blackboard. This philosophy is partly to do with keeping up with the latest developments so that our leading learning technologists can explore the latest features in their courses, and partly to do with avoiding security problems and unfixable bugs. Our aim (until this year) has been to arrive at September running an odd numbered (i.e. stability release) service pack. We've tried to avoid installing an SP until it has been out for 3 months as the installation instructions tend to stabilise over that time. For us that means we set off on the academic year in September with a stable fully supported version of Blackboard that's been out long enough for the critical problems to be fixed. What I've found is that any security problems and major bugs that turn up tend to get fixed in the newer SPs first and some bugs in old SPs can only be fixed by upgrading to a more recent SP. By sticking with the latest stable release we've had a fairly easy run through each academic year only applying small patches to problems as they arise. This year I installed the April 2014 release in July, but we're finding more than than usual number of problems. However, we do have all the new gadgets, like portfolios, integrated SafeAssign and anonymous marking and we're looking forward to CU2 and a few bug fixes which we're hoping to have before the students come back. As we were on SP13 and that drops off support in December 2014 the only choices were SP14 and the April 2014 release and I felt more comfortable with the April 2014 release. Jon. P.S. Here's the link for the support schedule http://library.blackboard.com/docs/support/supportsvcguide.pdf On 30 July 2014 09:24, Tyrone Knight <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote: Dear all, I have seen a lot of posts and concerns on here recently to do with the April 2014 sp, and I was wondering how many people have or will shortly upgrade to this version, on their LIVE system. Here we are Managed Hosted, and on 9.1 sp 13, but I would like to have a stable system for the start of term (with as few faults as possible) I have booked the upgrade to the April sp for August the 10th, but I may cancel So if I could please ask where do you stand for upgrading this Summer? 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