Michael Chasen CEO and co founder of the company gave an overview of the product strategy and in particular a live demonstration of Blackboard 9 which they plan to ship around the end of 08 or early 09. This is the penultimate step towards the single next generation platform which will be a hybred of Bb Academic Suite and Blackboard Vista (formerly WebCT vista) which will eventually culminate in a single product Bb v10.

The move is towards a more open platform (as opposed to open source!) which will easily engage with almost any web services, open communications featuring RSS and SMS, compliance with more open standards, higher accessibility standards than laid down in any US or European Legislation and WWC and lastly multi Content management support - including the ability to blend with other social tools, content systems like Joomla and even learning systems such as Moodle and Sakai.

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The newly designed User interface (AJAX and DHTML) will offer itegration with social networks such as facebook, and mobile technology including iPh

 The new interface presented some radical changes both to look and feel as well as in functionality but he showed that the transition would be smoothed in ver 9 by the ability for the user to switch between the new product and earlier navigational structures

The main home page - My Account at Swansea - is changed into a drag and drop environment so that users can create their own experience laid out as it best suits them. A similar approach will apply on the new course landing page, a kind of mini portal into each module, where information that needs to be presented upfront to students can be displayed in a similar way to the main my account page. Throughout the new interface users will, in most places, be able to edit the page directly from the content, in a much more intuitive way, without needing to navigate through the course control panel. 

A number of new features, many web 2.0 and open standards, were shown, though not in any great depth. The pictures below give a basic idea of what is to come - they were grabbed from the side using my Nokia phone - so apologies for the quallity -  if anyone has better photos or better still a video I would love to include it here - please feel free to add your content or a link to it - I would stress that the slideshow is intended just to give a flavour of what is to come - there is no detailed information available as yet.