Hello,

You are receiving this mail because you are a student in a Blackboard course from a recent semester.  Please note:  replies to this email will not be responded to.

On behalf of BbCore (the Blackboard governance committee), I am notifying you that the Blackboard upgrade process will begin on July 24th at 10pm, and will be unavailable per the detailed schedule below.

Historically Blackboard has been upgraded over a weekend; however, usage of Blackboard actually increases over the weekend during the summer term. To help alleviate the impact to those users accessing Blackboard on the weekends, BbCore has decided to upgrade the environment during the overnight of a weekday. UMS IT has committed to delivering the upgraded environment within 24 hours, which is 39 hours less than previous upgrades.  


The detailed schedule is:

     Thursday, July 24th 10pm - Blackboard is taken down. Backups of the system commence.

     Thursday, July 24th 11:59pm - Upgrade process begins

     Friday, July 25th 5pm - Upgrade process completes. System testing begins.

     Friday, July 25th - 10pm - Blackboard returns to service


Please mark these dates on your calendars, as you will have no access to Blackboard during this upgrade. If you try to access the Blackboard site, you’ll be redirected to a static page announcing that maintenance is underway.


If you have further questions, please contact your campus Blackboard support person. You can also see more information online at http://support.courses.maine.edu/


Thank you for your patience during this upgrade process.