Early in 2006 Blackboard purchased WebCT.  Many of the WebCT developers and others were offered positions at Blackboard and it was promised that the WebCT Campus Edition 6 and Vista 4 learning systems would be combined with the Blackbaord Academic Suite over time.  The products continue to converge, although we do not have information on when a complete convergence will be completed.  Administrative, development, and support operations have combined. Blackboard NG version 9 will be the first version to combine the features of Blackboard Academic Suite, WebCT version 4.1 and WebCT CE 6.  Versions of all products were migrated to version 8, so that the next offering for all products would be the combined version 9.  Our current version is CE 8.0.3, which has been renamed Blackboard Learning System CE Enterprise. 

To ease the migration to version 9 UTMB will continue to run CE 8 along side of version 9, i.e. Co-Production mode.  This will allow both CE8 and version 9 courses to be offered (using the same authentication)  and during the 2009-2010 school year we will begin migration to version 9.  It is expected that all new courses offered for the 2010-2011 academic year will be hosted with version 9.  The name for the newest version is Blackboard Learn⁺ version 9.