As part of our ongoing effort to provide the best possible service, we are building out a new North American Collaborate web conferencing environment in Blackboard’s Managed Hosting facility in Virginia (in addition to the existing Calgary facility). This is being done to accommodate the growth in usage of the Collaborate service and to better balance the load of our North American datacenters.  Blackboard will continue to maintain a Canadian hosting facility in Calgary for Canadian enterprise Collaborate customers.  Non-Canadian Collaborate customers will be migrated to the new North American environment.

When will this migration occur?

To minimize interruption to end users, customers will be migrated during an extended maintenance window on Saturday, December 21 2013.

Begin Time: Saturday, December 21st, 2013 14:00 US Eastern (UTC-5)

End Time: Sunday, December 22nd, 2013 06:00 US Eastern (UTC-5)

Affected Users:NA-SAS

What can I expect from this migration?

Customers being migrated to the Virginia datacenter will not have to make any changes to their systems or configuration settings. The domain name, URLs, and IP addresses of the web conferencing service will not change as a result of this move, and we expect a very smooth transition.

Please Note – Canadian enterprise customers have been contacted and given the steps required to access the Collaborate service in Canada after December 21, 2013.  Please remember to make any configuration changes as appropriate and as described in the following Collaborate Support knowledge base articles.

• FAQ’s for data center migration on December 21, 2013
• Configuration changes needed for Canadian customer who will remain hosted in Canada

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Blackboard Collaborate Technical Support through our support portal at http://support.blackboardcollaborate.com. 

• Please refer to the North American Web Conferencing Status Page for the most up to date status of our system.
• Please refer to knowledge base article 3072 for more information on the Blackboard Collaborate notification process.

To unsubscribe to these notifications: If you have an account on the Blackboard Collaborate support portal, login at: http://support.blackboardcollaborate.com Then manage your subscriptions at: ‘My Support’ tab > ‘My Subscriptions’. If you do not have a login to our support portal, send a message to: bbcollabsupport-unsubscribe@blackboard.com with the subject title “Unsubscribe”. Please allow 1-2 business days to process.