The SaaS Migration Diaries #3: Inching forwards

In my last post we had reached an impasse while migrating legacy content.  The tool claimed it had worked, but there was no evidence from the data that it had.

In this post I share how I got on with Blackboard support and some other news from our SaaS Migration Project.



Legacy Content with Support

My ticket with to Blackboard support was assigned to Garry in Tier 2 who I has often been assigned our difficult tickets and always found a way out for us.  Garry went through how I had set up the tool.  He had several suggestions:

1. The tool may have run successfully but apparently there is some content the tool cannot move, so maybe everything was actually as expected?
2. Our development environment was perhaps too small for the test results to be clear one way or the other, we should continue to preprod and see what happened there.
3. A good test is to upload a Scorm package to a course, but not open it.  It will first be uploaded as legacy content, but if any user opens it, it will be migrated to xyphos.  So leave some fresh unopened Scorm content on the environment and note what happens to it when we run the migration tool.

So the next step was for me to write up and assign a number of project tasks to the various operational teams I have to involve when doing Blackboard back end work.  We have a DBA team, a systems team who deal with the VMs, and a Applications Management team who deal with the java based applications.  I have to write plans, instructions, deliverables, and acceptance criteria, gain agreement from their management, talk through the tasks with the staff to whom they are assigned, and then run the exercise.  

Going through all this bureaucracy takes about 2 weeks before any real action takes place.  This is one reason why I am so looking forward to getting our Blackboard on SaaS, so that I no longer have to go through our byzantine processes which seem more like "makework" than having real value to the organisation. 

Our preproduction legacy content migration is scheduled for Wednesday 1 April.  Fingers crossed.

CORVID

Of course we are now doing this whilst in lock down and I do miss being able to see my colleagues face to face.  When I have my project manager hat on I really want to see the people I am working with as the non-verbal cues of my colleagues are quite vital, I find, to ensuring that I can be confident that my colleagues understand what is required of them and that they do not have reservations that they are hesitant to express.

Like many, I have been involved in creating extra support resources and webinars for our academic community.  Most recently I have created our own Continuity of Education resources for Blackboard, and ran a webinar about using Discussion Boards to facilitate Asynchronous Communication.

Collaborate

Coronavirus has also led to me given a mandate to accelerate the roll-out of Collaborate.  The original plan was to be over the summer following the SaaS migration.  The new mandate is to have it ready by 20 April.  Considering I have a week and a half off over Easter, and lots of SaaS migration work mid-flow, this is an ambitious timetable.

Luckily colleagues at Blackboard have been very helpful.  Alistair Brook enabled us to use our Collaborate licence early, and Pedro Dans furnished me with the credentials.  Sam Brown introduced himself as our project manager for the rollout of Collaborate and Ally (still planned for the summer).  And he set up meetings with Lloyd Stock who has delivered some training presentations to me on getting set up with Collaborate.  

Thanks to their support I have Collaborate integrated in our Blackboard preproduction environment.  Next week I will consider how best to rollout considering the little time available to create support materials.

It's fortuitous that I have been doing the Online Course Facilitation Using Blackboard Collaborate free course on Bb Academy.  This has been really timely and Mike Highfield has been doing a great job running this online course.

The Mobile / Collaborate User Group (MoCo) are a great help.  At the monthly meeting I was able to ask for some rollout tips from experienced admins.

Upgrading Live to 2018 Q4 CU10

Before we can do legacy content migration on the live environment we need to update Live to CU10 in order to workaround the Turnitin issue with the migration tool.  I am scheduling this for Tuesday 7 April.

Communications

Announcing this downtime meant I finally had to break the news to our user community. not only of the downtime but also of the unknown amount of downtime this summer to move to the cloud. 

I had hesitated from doing this thus far because with such a contentious and expensive project I wanted the communications to be well considered and approved by the project board.  It has often been difficult to get project board engagement for Blackboard projects and this year our department has had a brutal reorganisation.  I myself was expecting to be made redundant only a few weeks ago.  This had meant that the roles of executive and sponsor had never been particularly clarified for this project and during a meeting to do so a key member of the project team was so offended by the decision as to wash their hands of any further engagement with the project.  This colleague was who had been relying on to work with me to carefully pace and deploy our communications strategy.

So I ended up drafting an email over 15 minutes, informing users of the immediate downtime and also about our migration to the cloud.  I sold the summer changes as being part of getting Ally and Collaborate and also shared that I would be trying to get Collaborate in as quickly as possible in time for start of summer term.  This is not how I had intended to christen communications of such an important and expensive project, but it was the reality.

I did have some fun when I shared news about moving to the cloud in a the Discussion Boards webinar I mentioned above.  I used a number of paintings from the National Portrait Gallery which are available for creative commons usage.  The painting below is one of the most famous British paintings by J.Turner: The Fighting Temeraire.  Read the caption below for the analogy I made between our self-hosted Blackboard and the Temeraire.

One of my slides from my Discussion Boards webinar.  I compared the Temeraire to our locally hosted Blackboard installation the servers for which date back to 2013.  Like the Temeraire it gave years of vital service, but it's now time to retire it and move into the future.

Getting ready for the next steps

We also had our official "kick-off" call with Pedro Dans, our Blackboard SaaS Migration Project Manager and Service Delivery Manager.  Pedro is really a great Blackboard guy and I've known him for a long time.  Pedro is keen for us to get started with the S3 migration tools, so next week we'll be asking the tech team to review the tools and plan out how to approach using them.  We will also set up a weekly call with Pedro which is likely to be on Thursday mornings.

Some good news

A single piece of good news.  A dedicated project manager has been found to take on the project so that I can do more Blackboard specific activities and COVID-related assistance, particularly rolling out Collaborate.  Migrating from me to the new PM will take a few weeks as I want to finish the tasks I have got started and am in the middle of like legacy content and CU10, all new tasks will be run by the new PM.  From May onwards he will be in full control of the project.

On the Next Episode of The SaaS Migration Diaries...

Find out what happens with legacy content migration in preprod, and how we approach the S3 migration tools.