Building Blocks Conference is now in session!

This morning Dave Lambert, CIO of Georgetown University opened the 3rd Annual Building Blocks Developers Conference. In his opening remarks he noted that eLearning systems are mission critical, more so than HR and Financial systems. He said that the biggest hurdle to migrating from Blackboard 5 to Blackboard 6 was finding the window of time in which to take the system down for the switchover.

He also said that Building Blocks is at the intersection of opensource, commercially developed and client innovations. At this confluence is where the real edge of innovation exists for campuses running eLearning systems. I couldn't agree with him more.

After his opening remarks he introduced Matthew Pittinsky, Chairman of Blackboard. Matthew's Keynote covered three topics:

• A "State of the Developer Community" Update which showed the growth in Building Blocks usage, community members, and collaboration amongst developers as well as the growth in the System Administrator Community.
• A view into the Building Blocks roadmap as part of the overall Blackboard Product Roadmap. This section highlighted the new Building Blocks Catalog (launching Fall 2005), new Beta APIs and much more.
• Blackboard's committment to and activities within the Standards community and interoperabililty with other systems. Bob Alcorn took the stage to discuss the recent collaboration for the IMS Tools Interoperability Framework demonstration at the Alt-i-Lab conference. Bob also demonstrated the MERLOT Search Building Block.

It was a great start to the largest Blackboard developer conference ever!