Hi Richard,
At Bristol we have three Blackboard environments that we utilise for upgrading -
We normally update at the end of July/early August.
Our rough plan is to update our sandbox environment in January (or as soon as the version is available) to the proposed Service Pack and begin looking at the new features. This is normally kept as a vanilla install an no local customisations or third party building blocks are installed.
During the Easter period (or there abouts) we then update on Test environment. We leave this until then as it mirrors our production environment and by this time the previous release is either unsupported or all 'quirks' have been discovered and we have little or no need to test user generated issues on this environment.
On this test environment we install all new building blocks and local customisations so it is as close as possible to how the system would be post upgrade on our production environment.
We would then enter a Full Functional Test of the Service Pack, investigation of reported Known Issues and building block updates.
If a later version of Blackboard has been released we will consider updating our Sandbox to the latest version for comparison.
During the upgrade window (Normally 5 days) we make a replacement service available to staff and students. This is to ensure that resitting students retain access to course materials. We state this is a read only system but we still have users making changes. We do leave this environment available for short period to allow staff to access any changes they have made.
Once we have upgraded we switch back to production but state we have a two week at risk period. At this point we run a shorter Critical test against our four production servers rather than the time consuming full functional test.
Happy to talk more off list if you want to contact me.
Best wishes
Pete
