• Generates RSS feed XML files from Blackboard course announcements
• Feed names can be based on your course ID or any name you specify for each course
• RSS feeds are updated as often as you schedule it to run
• System announcements can be in a feed by themselves or included with each feed
• Each feed includes the date and time the instructor last updated course content
• Most default settings can be overridden for each feed
• NOT a Blackboard Building Block, works with both Basic Edition and Enterprise Edition
• Does not require a server, any Windows PC running XP or later should work
• Creates a log file that is itself an RSS feed (see sample feed to the right)
• Free limited "Demo" version available
• Low cost, introductory license cost is only $200.00 for the first year.
• Purchase orders accepted from most institutions
  

A: No not at this time. If your institution is interested in working with us to develop one please send us an e-mail.

Q: What security is on the feeds? How do you keep students from looking at feeds from classes that they are not enrolled in?

A: By default the name of the RSS feed is based on the Blackboard Course ID. So, if a student knows the Course ID and the pattern that your school uses he/she would be able to subscribe to a different course. However, for any feed you can specify the name for the feed regardless of the course ID. If your institution has a course that you want to protect the feed you can override the normal feed name to a random string.

Also, because BB->RSS takes up so few resources you could install it multiple times where each installation pushes the feeds that are generated to a different part of your network. You may want all student feeds to go into one folder on one server and other feeds (faculty, staff, administration, etc.) to go into a different folder or even onto a different server.

Version 1.0 - July 2006

Release Notes:

• Initial Public Release
  

Download Demo Version
User & Installation Manual Only (PDF)