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?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is Blackboard?

        * Learning Management System (LMS) software partially owned by Microsoft

http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_ by_Microsoft_Corporation

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

[Aqua OS X]

It should be noted that, with or without Vista and IE 7, Blackboard is absolute GARBAGE.

I'm sorry, but after experiencing Blackboard in grad school, I would tend shift my suspicion to the incompetent developers and designers behind Blackboard, not the incompetent developers and designers behind Windows.

It's a feature.

[Jacques Chester]

Blackboard is awful, terrible software. Microsoft have simply filtered it out as part of their quality assurance program.

MySpace is next.

*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.

The icing on the cake...

[zumbojo]

...is that a few months ago in anticipation for the new version of Windows, Blackboard named a new piece of software in its honor: "WebCT Vista." Fast forward a few months, and I get the funniest e-mail from the dept. that handles Blackboard:

"WebCT Vista is not supported on the Windows Vista platform."

*facepalm*

Internet Explorer 7

[YutakaFrog]

My University uses WebCT a bunch. I was saddened when FireFox 2.0 came out, and it would pop up a window every time I logged in that said the browser was unsupported. Now, they've updated their software and FF2 is good to go. However, the homepage now has the following notice:

The latest version of Internet Explorer does not work well with WebCT. We encourage you to use vesion 6 or download Firefox and use that. We will post a list of knwon issues with this browser once we have them. This will only be temporary until WebCT can resolve the browser issues. Thank you, WebCT Staff And that has been there a LOT longer than the FireFox alert was. :) Thank you, MicroSoft, for helping spread FireFox.

So much for Data Analysis

[j_f_chamblee]

It looks like many quantitative applications are currently not going to work on Vista, at least for now. Major statistical analysis, data mining and Geographic Information Systems tools that don't run on Vista include:

SPSS, SAS, MATLAB and SAP and ESRI ArcGIS

Eh, this is no big deal, right? I mean, who really wants to know about facts and numbers? Especially when you are using a *computer*.