This morning's keynote

Project NG Developer's Roadmap
by Jessica Finnefrock, SVP Product Development
and Bob Alcorn, Chief Architect

As usual, everything they said may change. Blackboard 9 will be the first unified code product, with Blackboard X as the final goal.

There will be lots of options to customise the portal using many different colour schemes, and we'll have control over all of the CSS throughout the product. You should be able to customise the CSS and colours by role as well, so different faculties, distance learning, etc. could have different look and feel.

You'll be able to integrate Moodle, Sakai, etc. into the portal if you are running them in different schools. (Not really relevant to us).

Building blocks are going to be the chosen framework over PowerLinks as they do more than PLs do. Still, should require some rewrites of existing building blocks to cope with new UI options.

Hoping to have no database migration and allow anyone a direct upgrade from versions 8.

Bit discouraged when Bob Alcorn said he was blown away by the social learning stuff Michael Wesch was doing and didn't have anything near that exciting planned. At least from the rest of his presentation, it seems like they are working on making it more open and able to work with other services via common web protocols.

They want to simplify page development through more powerful tag libraries with many common functions already programmed for you.

Introducing something called Proxy Tools for now, which could allow some extension without needing to know lots of Java and put the system at risk. I wasn't sure how they would really work though.

Also they will improve the Web Services on offer, with a standard tool set, authentication framework, and a system management consol to allow you to manage them better.

Made a comment that the new Blackboard Sync doesn't have to connect with Facebook (though that is all it does currently), that it is able to be extended to connect with anything, such as mobile devices potentially.

Session was basically an overview of changes, pointing at detailed follow up sessions later for more. I skipped the web services one as I think it sounds good (maybe down the road allowing connection to more things like blogs on the web, etc.), but I don't think knowing the technical details of the code would be terribly helpful to me. Just better to know they are allowing that sort of thing to start taking place.

I will be checking out the user interface changes for building block session later that Mary's asked me to go to though, as it will affect us more immediately. I feel bad for anyone presenting at the same time as that one, as every single person I've talked to says they are going to the UI one.

Was disappointed in the keynote in that it only lasted about 30 minutes out of the hour planned, had no time for questions, and didn't really say that much. On top of that, I didn't win the Wii raffle either.