Currently: Blackboard 9.1 SP3 w/Community, Learn, Content System
Many of our teachers have enabled guest access to a few areas of their courses to use them for school to home communication (one-way). In 9.1 SP3, this seems to work well - the teachers make the content areas guest accessible, use a content system folder set to public access to post materials, and utilize the public access setting in Campus Pack blogs.They then use the URL displayed for the course (albeit ugly) to send to parents. Yes, many of then use a URL-shortening service...
However, I was just reading on the listserv that guest access might be changing in the latest version on Bb (sp8) in a way that would require guest users to go through the login screen first, signing in as guest, before accessing a guest accessible page in a Bb shell. Can anyone confirm this?I tried this in the latest version of coursesites and it does require me to login (if I did everything right).
Will my instructors still be able to send a direct link to parents to access the guest available portion of their course?
Our plan is to upgrade to sp8 or 9 in July.
Thanks!
Ryan Fuller
Closest thing we have to a system admin
Cobb County School District
Ryan,
Are you trying to give the guests access to areas of the course, or are you trying to give them access to files in the content system?
I've been participating in the conversation on the listserv, and guest access has not changed as far as I'm aware. If you have guest access enabled on the system and the courses, and tab page/direct access enabled as the start page (all under Admin Panel > Gateway Options), then I believe things will continue to work as they always have. At least, my SP8 server configured that way allows guest users to go directly to a course via the URL without going through the login page.
Guest users have always needed a session cookie to access things in the system. If "tab page/direct access" (used to be called "portal direct access" in Bb 6/7/8) is turned on, then that session cookie is granted when they connect to the server rather than when they click through the login page.
Mike