Anthology support terms are the operating rules that sit beside the licence: who may call, how fast Blackboard responds, which releases are maintained and what is excluded. For licensing they matter because the documents are incorporated by reference, can be changed by posting, and in several places make a benefit conditional on the customer staying within its contracted usage.
How the documents fit together
The Master Agreement says that Support, service levels and overage rates are provided as described in the Blackboard Customer Support Services Guide, and that a failure to meet a service level is not a breach and the sole remedy is what the service level document provides.[2] The Learn support catalogue is the current Services Guide for Blackboard Teaching & Learning products across SaaS, Managed Hosting and self-hosted deployments. It opens with a statement that all support services are subject to the terms of the applicable software licence agreement or support services agreement, and that Blackboard reserves the right to modify the document, effective five days after the modified document is posted at the relevant link, the posting constituting effective notice of changes.[1] The 2016 SaaS schedule contains the same five-day modification language.[8] A customer’s support entitlements can therefore change without a signed amendment, although the Master Agreement says modifications to the agreement itself must be in a signed writing.[2]
Supported products and categories
The December 2023 catalogue lists Blackboard Learn, the SaaS Deployment for Blackboard Learn, Blackboard Learn for Course Delivery, Blackboard Mobile Solutions and Ally as covered products. It sorts every product version into Full Support, Extended Support or No Longer Supported. Full Support includes scheduled and necessary updates such as product and security fixes, and SaaS deployments of Learn receive frequent updates under Full Support. Versions in No Longer Supported status receive no active maintenance or scheduled updates, only self-service support, and cases opened by phone or the support portal for them are closed, with narrow exceptions for Managed Hosting clients such as reporting an outage or requesting restoration of deleted content.[1]
The lifecycle table shows monthly Learn 9.1 releases from 3900.0 (November 2020) to 3900.80 (December 2023), each with a No Longer Supported date of 2023-12-31 or earlier, and a footnote that from 2023-12-31 Blackboard no longer provides Full Support for self-hosted deployments, only Extended Support, and that Managed Hosting deployments were no longer supported after 2022-12-31.[1] In Extended Support only the most recent self-hosted release is supported, email and telephone support are available during local business hours only, service levels are commercially reasonable efforts, and break/fix is available for Severity 1 and 2 issues if commercially reasonable and not for Severity 3.[1]
Who may call and how
A client may designate up to two personnel for receiving Support and may name substitutes by written notice, with no more than two at a time. The designated people should have access to the administrator interface and, for self-hosted systems, SSH or VNC/Terminal Services access to the server. The client also needs a Primary System Administrator who acts as the main point of contact.[1] Support is provided in English, with other languages at Blackboard’s discretion. Telephone support is stated to be available around the clock every day of the year, case submission is by telephone or web self-service only, and requests made by third parties or directly to staff are not covered.[1] For a customer with several departments using Learn, the two-contact limit is a practical constraint on who can open cases.
Severity levels
The catalogue defines four severity levels. Severity 1 means the production system is down, disabled or non-responsive, with a target response within one hour and applying only to production environments. Severity 2 means major components are unavailable or unusable, with a response within four hours. Severity 3 means minor components are functioning abnormally, and Severity 4 means the system is operating normally but the user needs instructional assistance; both have a target response of one business day.[1] The catalogue notes that severity may be changed by Support, that service level agreement response times may vary and that the client contract should be consulted in case of doubt. If requested information is not supplied within nine days the case is treated as withdrawn and closed.[1]
Exclusions and unsupported configurations
Support does not cover products in unsupported configurations, improper use such as unauthorised customisation, unsupported database changes such as writing directly to the database, querying of Advanced System Reporting, Open DB, Direct Data Access or Blackboard Data, query writing, custom roles guidance, third-party tools without a support partnership, and several other items, some of which are available as separately priced professional consulting.[1] The catalogue also says that clients are not permitted to change the schemas presented in the Learn schema documentation, and that clients can download that documentation under the terms of their licence to build read-only queries and custom reports.[1]
Service levels as a licence-linked benefit
Service-level documents appear in the Learn SaaS article and summarise as follows. Learn SaaS targets 99.9% uptime per calendar month with credits of 1, 2 or 5 days of fees, a seven-day claim window, a monthly cap of one month of fees and a condition that the customer is within contracted limits and on the current software version.[3] Ally has a separate commitment of 99.9% per calendar month with a similar credit table and a seven-day claim window.[4] Managed Hosting, now retired, had a 99.7% availability target and a host latency measure, and made credits conditional on usage within contracted Active User Capacity and storage.[7] A customer whose Authorized Users, storage or version are out of line with its contract can lose an otherwise valid credit.
Data Processing Addendum
The Anthology Data Processing Addendum, version 4.0, dated December 28, 2022, is incorporated by reference into the Master Agreement between the customer and the Anthology group entity listed in it, and applies whenever Personal Information is processed under the agreement.[5] The Master Agreement points to it in section 5 and describes the security measures in its Annex B in section 6.[2] Provisions relevant to licence and vendor management include the following.
- Further processing. Provided that Anthology processes only the minimum personal information necessary and the output is aggregated or de-identified, the customer agrees that Anthology may process personal information for additional lawful purposes including evaluating, improving and developing its products and services.[5]
- Sub-processors. Anthology may disclose personal information to sub-processors, gives a general authorisation for those on its published lists, informs the customer of changes 30 days before they happen with 20 days to raise reasonable objections, and may add a sub-processor immediately in an emergency. It states that it will not sell personal information other than in a transfer in connection with a merger, acquisition or other sale of all or part of the business.[5]
- Audit. Anthology provides documentation such as HECVAT reports, ISO certification documents and SOC 2 reports on request. A customer that still needs more information may, where applicable data privacy laws grant the right, request an audit not more than once per year, with at least 14 days’ written notice, and the customer reimburses Anthology’s reasonable expenses for time spent.[5]
- Deletion and return. On expiry or termination Anthology deletes personal information within a reasonable time and returns it at the customer’s request and expense if the request is made in writing at least 30 days before termination. Without such a request Anthology may keep or return the data for no more than 10 days after termination, it certifies deletion on request, and it may retain data required by law, in inaccessible backups, or in aggregated or de-identified form.[5]
The 30-day return request is a termination-planning item: a customer migrating to another LMS should schedule the request well before the term ends.
Terms of Use for individual users
Separate Terms of Use apply to individuals who use the products. They are an agreement with Blackboard International B.V. for residents of the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom and with Blackboard T&L, LLC otherwise, and they give users a personal, worldwide, royalty-free, non-assignable and non-exclusive licence subject to those terms and any agreement entered into by the user’s institution. The terms contain an individual arbitration and class action waiver, state that student data is governed by the institution’s agreement, and give way to a written agreement between the institution and Blackboard on any conflict.[6] The Terms of Use are not the source of institutional counting rules.
Out of scope
This article does not cover the support terms of the divested product lines or the contents of the sub-processor lists, which are on separate help pages that were not reviewed. It does not state response or credit values for any individual contract.