Vista Failing "Blackboard" College Courses

writertype writes "Although Blackboard is used to communicate between students and professors at virtually all of PC Magazine/Princeton Review's top 20 wired colleges, when run under a Vista environment users can see glitches. Moreover, IT departments told PC Mag that if Blackboard is used with Vista plus IE7, students can't communicate via the software. When asked why, Microsoft ... waffled. Blackboard says they'll have a fix in place by summer. Meanwhile, are there any other common college apps that Vista fails to work with?"

Comments

What's Microsoft got to do with it?

[davmoo]

When asked why, Microsoft ... waffled.

They shouldn't have waffled. They should have given the answer this deserves...how the hell is this Microsoft's problem to correct?

Vista was in beta forever and a day. Beta 3 was out and the API was locked down for at least several months before RTM. In cases where any third party software does not now work under Vista, it is *entirely* the fault of that software company. Holding Microsoft responsible to any degree here is just plain stupid.

Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it?

[Detritus]

It is Microsoft's fault if Vista broke existing applications without a very good reason for doing so. The rest of the world isn't obligated to follow Microsoft around like a circus dog, jumping through all their hoops.

Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it?

[batkiwi]

So whose fault is it that the nvidia headers for binary drivers have to be recompiled every kernel release due to incompatabilities for no good reason?

Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it?

[Detritus]

Sounds like a driver interface design problem.

Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it?

[hdparm]

You are absolutely right although there might be a bit of guilt on the other side, if MS didn't break functionality between last beta and vista release.

I mostly blame schools though. They are the ones who let the vista in without going through enough testing, Like they haven't experienced exactly the same with previous windows releases.

Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it?

[aaronmarks]

I have been amazed by the IT community's/press' reaction to Vista and Internet Explorer 7. This case with Blackboard is the perfect example of the complaint I have been hearing all to often recently, "Why doesn't website/program X work with IE7/Vista?", which is generally followed by, "I can't believe Microsoft did this, they must have a huge problem on their hands!".

The thing is though, this isn't Microsoft's problem. Vista was in beta for a very very long time. As a result, all of these businesses that develop website/program X should have started testing about a year ago (maybe even more) for compatibility issues. Vista was pre-released to IT professionals and Developers like all Microsoft beta products. I think that Microsoft's openess to developers and IT pros is one of their best qualities; it is definitely a compelling reason for why their latest software been so stable and feature packed (Exchange 2007, Office 2007, Windows Vista, etc.)

On the other hand, I do find it completely irresponsible that developers have not fix their webites to work with Vista. If you run a major software application like Blackboard, one can assume that it is going to be running on unmanaged PC's. Whenever a softare application is developed for an unamanged environment, all majority platforms need to be accounted for. Vista is more than just another platform, it now comes on every manufacturers shipping Home & Home Office PCs and in 2 years it will become the primary OS in nearly all environments.

For a business like Blackboard to make the statement; "If your PC breaks tomorrow and you need to go buy a new one, TOO BAD! We don't care enough about Vista so we aren't going to modify our software to work with it." That is just poor judgement on their part because the way I see it, many companies like Blackboard are just being lazy. They figure that because they are the standard of their industry/field, they can get by without supporting major new platforms. In reality they are just trying to save on developement costs at the consumer/end-users expense.

Vista is a great stable operating system and their should be absolutely no reason for any major softare or website to not work with it.

Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it?

[Dunbal]

this isn't even remotely microsoft's responsibility to make sure that every program ever made works for their operating system

      Especially not when they SELL access to the information so that you can keep your software current, in the form of MSDN subscriptions (which are not cheap, btw).

Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it?

[cheater512]

Works in every browser (including IE 6) but not IE 7. Microsoft fucked up.

Everyone else shouldn't be doing Microsoft's job for them - making it work.

Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it?

[drsmithy]

It is Microsoft's fault if Vista broke existing applications without a very good reason for doing so.

No, it's Microsoft's fault if the application was written to documented APIs and following their recommended practices.

Given that 99% of software problems in Windows are caused by applications that *don't* do this (Exhibit A: any application released in the last ~8 years or so that needlessly requires Administrator privileges), this is probably something Microsoft deserve the benefit of the doubt on.

Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it?

[BrokenHalo]

So whose fault is it that the nvidia headers for binary drivers have to be recompiled every kernel release due to incompatabilities for no good reason?

How do you know it's for no good reason? If you've seen the source code, then perhaps you might enlighten us.

In any case, who cares? nVidia does it, and does it very promptly when required. Which is more than we can say for the majority of hardware producers, who as a rule are content to leave Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD users completely unsupported.

Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it?

[Vexorian]

I kind of not agree, I think this is the colleges' fault for jumping into vista without actually testing their main applications.

Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it?

[Dunbal]

The APIs are documented on MSDN. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/ is free. Have you heard of a little something called the internet?

      Sure. You can get free versions of the SDK. Usually a few months AFTER the OS/Program or whatever is released. If you pay, however, you get in early. My point stands.

Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it?

[DavidTC]

Blackboard isn't a windows program.

Blackboard is a web application.

However the fact it doesn't work in Vista is almost certainly entirely Blackboard's fault, because they're morons who don't know how to code to web standards, instead making all sorts of custom crap that required lowered security and only worked on one browser. Yeah, only supporting IE6 was fun and saved you idiot a good 5% of the work, but now you're fucked.

I'm glad all the people who decided to write custom shit for IE6 the last five years are being left out in the cold with IE7 and/or Vista incompatibilities or added security. It couldn't happen to a nice bunch of fucktards.

And now yet another bunch of developers will have 'Microsoft does not care for you, so coding specifically to one of their products instead of an open standard is the stupidest possible move imaginable' burned into their brains. The HTML and Active X coders working in IE6 can go stand with the J# and VB6 people.

Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it?

[jrockway]

Blackboard does absolutely nothing special. It's a web page with some links to other HTML pages. There's no reason why it shouldn't work in IE, other than really really really really invalid HTML.

Guess what, Blackboard... there are standards (and QA teams) for a reason!

*shrug*

[fabs64]

Hopefully this encourages universities to move away from Blackboard if anything.. it's a steaming pile of crap, really.
Doesn't affect me anyway, as any school of comp sci should be, all our labs are thin x-servers.
The rest of the uni can suffer in Novell hell for all I care, stupid ITS.

Re:Not so simple

[Mateo_LeFou]

"Microsoft, with infinite access to the source code of their operating system, would be able to create better tools."

But this would undermine the planned-obsolescence/forced-upgrade strategy, which -- if you hadn't noticed -- is a more important piece of their business than "create better tools".

sloppy coding?

[briancnorton]

Writing a Win32/64 app that only works in one OS/browser/java version/etc seems to me to be sloppy coding. Blackboard is a *WEB* app, is it not? Why does the client matter? Usually the answer is because the Devs were lazy and took shortcuts by using the client to do something that the server could just as easily do. (Not necessarily the case here)

Re:Vista == WinME

[Slyswede]

If you actually take the time to analyze these "stories" you'll realize that almost all of the problems people blaim Vista for is actually not anything that has to do with the operating system, but the applications that run on it.

Just take the complaints about no wireless access in the above posts for example. Vista has nothing to do with the fact that these universities force people to run a Cisco VPN client to get access. Considering how long Vista has been availible to developers, this shouldn't even be an issue, but apparently Cisco has more important things to do than update their software to work on the new OS. Same thing goes for a lot of other high profile vendors who seem very reluctant to adapt to a Vista compatible world.

The pressure on these vendors to adapt will continue to increase as Vista will slowly but surely replace XP as the Microsoft desktop platform of choice.

It's lack of responsibility...

[Marnhinn]

Even though the parent is ranked funny, there is lots of truth to it.

I've worked with and had to support Blackboard before. There are few applications that I think are worse. (I recall a bug that we experienced, where if two people submitted an assessment at the same time, or very close to the same time, the software would lose one of them.)

Also, as crappy as Vista is, it was in beta and development for a long time. At the very least, Blackboard should have issued an advisory stating that under certain conditions their software breaks. (And no sensible IT department at any major educational facility should have upgraded already anyways.)

I guess I would say the root of the problem is the lack of responsibility in the software world. Unlike some professions (for example: Civil Engineering), there is no real regulation or prevailent society to make sure that people develop by a set of standards. Having something like that, would go a long ways toward fixing problems like this.