On Thursday May 23^rd starting at 1pm LDAP master, Kerberos and Webadmin will be taken down for system maintenance.  During this time account creations and password changes will be unavailable.  The maintenance window will allow staff to apply needed security and application updates.  The outage window is expected to last three hours with services being restored by 4pm on Thursday May 23^rd.  

Note: The myUMBC Check My Activity tool still lets you compare your activity with all peers in all courses, but this new BA4L report may provide additional insights.

Bb course shells for SU2013 were created on April 14, 2013 on the Bb production server at http://blackboard.umbc.edu.  Enrollments for SU2013 courses will continue to be updated daily. Bb shells are available for all courses (designated as lecture, lab, field or discussion) listed in the UMBC Schedule of Classes (SOC), provided that there is an instructor of record listed. The addition of new course sections and/or instructors will result in new Bb shells being automatically generated each morning. Student enrollment in Bb will continue to mirror the official registration in SA, and will update hourly.

If you are an instructor, and your name is not associated with the course you are teaching in the SOC, please see your departmental scheduling coordinator to get that issue resolved. Once you are listed in the SOC, your Bb course shell will be created automatically.

Additionally in situations where one instructor is teaching multiple sections of the same course, by default all sections will be combined into one Bb course shell. This also includes sections of the same course taught in both Summer Session I and II. If you want to have separate shells for different sections, or separate shells for Summer Session I and II, please  submit an RT ticket with your request. If you need a shell for for a research or independent study course, please submit a new course request.

DoIT is offering Blackboard Drop-in Sessions to assist and help faculty prepare for summer courses.

Face to Face Sessions:

The following F2F sessions will be held in ENGR 025.  A DoIT staff member will be available to work one-on-one with users who show up during the designated times.  Please note that this is not a formal Blackboard training class.  Users may show up or leave at any point during these sessions. Additional dates and times may be added as demand warrants.

We are living in a world where people work from multiple devices — phone, laptop, and computer – and need access to their files anywhere and anytime. UMBC’s active directory (AD) system serves the campus well but it doesn’t provide the level of flexibility for mobile devices and off-campus access that people need.

The higher education community, through an initiative by Internet2, has worked with a company named Box.com to provide a service that we believe will meet our needs and is secure. Box is an online file sharing system that you can access from multiple devices. Box also allows you to share your files and folders with others easily.

Students, faculty, and staff will now be allowed to have web-based storage that they can use their myUMBC login to access. Files can be easily shared with others on campus and off-campus. You can even send a user a “URL” that allows someone that doesn’t have the Box.com service to access the file.

One of the nice features of Box.com is that is has great support for collaboration. It integrates well with Google Docs and we feel that faculty research groups will love the flexibility this provides in sharing data with other members of their research team.

DoIT will be rolling out this service with a limited launch to departments, faculty and staff that want to be early adopters, after which we will make this service available to everyone, including students. 

During the spring we will also identify departments that need more flexibility for shared file storage than AD provides and transition them over to the Box.com offering.

You can access Box by going to box.umbc.edu.