Blackboard and Xythos Announce New Building Blocks Partnership
Online Learning
Washington, D.C., September 17, 2002 - Blackboard, an Internet infrastructure company for e-education, and Xythos Software, a provider of Internet-enabled file management software, have revealed details of a partnership under which Xythos will join the Blackboard Building Blocks (B2) program.
Additionally, Blackboard will resell a specialized version of Xythos WebFile Server (WFS) to the higher education market.
Through the partnership with Xythos, Blackboard is addressing a recurring customer request for improved file management. Using the Blackboard Building Blocks architecture, Blackboard and Xythos have developed interoperability between the Blackboard Learning System and the Xythos WFS.
Now Blackboard users may choose an enhanced user interface for managing documents and multimedia within the Blackboard system. Additionally, the Xythos WFS brings the power and flexibility of WebDAV, enabling one-click publishing and drag & drop file management to the Blackboard platform.
Says Daniel Cane, SVP of Research and Development of Blackboard, "The Xythos product enables simplified content publishing to Blackboard, content reuse, and more effective sharing of content within Blackboard. These new features greatly enhance the ease-of-use and pedagogical effectiveness of the Blackboard platform."
Now instructors can maintain links to a single copy of each of their course documents in the Xythos WFS system, rather than uploading the documents separately to each of their Blackboard course websites. This simplifies the creation of institution-wide Blackboard-specific content libraries, to enable content reuse among multiple course websites and content sharing between instructors.
In addition, WFS will improve trainer-learner and learner-learner collaboration through improved drop-box functionality and content collaboration within course and group collaboration areas.
Using Xythos WFS, Blackboard users can control file access and versions as well as replace network-hungry file attachments with secure URLs. Xythos WFS also makes sharing files easier with file versioning, check in/out, and the automatic embedding of file links (URLs) in e-mail, substantially reducing the burden upon messaging systems.
WFS addresses growing security concerns related to file sharing with features including LDAP-based user authentication and SSL encrypted file transmission protection. Xythos user authentication will be integrated with the Blackboard authentication system.
Blackboard is locally represented by Riverbend.