Succeed Upgrade

We plan to upgrade Succeed to the latest release (October 2014) on August 1st. There are two reasons that we wish to upgrade:

(i) The underlying Oracle database needs upgrading and only the October 2014 release supports the appropriate release of Oracle

(ii) In the short-term, Blackboard have changed their release process away from two major releases a year (April/October) to one of smaller incremental upgrades and only the October 2014 release gets these, as say are called, cumulative updates. Thus we’ll be in a position to install security fixes, if needed, and add new functionality, if required.

Blackboard intend to return to their bi-annual release policy in April 2016.

The good news about October 2014 is that it is primarily a bug fix release and does not introduce a host of new features or modified workflows. Thus both staff and students should find that nothing or very little changes with the upgrade.

As we are upgrading both Succeed and the underlying database we expect Succeed to be down for the majority of 1st August (9am – 5pm). Obviously let us know if this date causes issues with planned activities.