Probably because they saw Canvas eating their lunch. Although I've heard rumblings that Canvas is turning into Blackboard by tacking on the very same useless bullshit they said no to in 2012.
Canvas dominated the higher-ed market with a single, lean, focused, simple product. They unbundled the sprawling, unfocused Blackboard suite. Now Canvas is in the next phase: re-bundling.
1/The flip side of unbundling: Later on, the unbundlers tend to try to rebundle in the image of whatever they unbundled.
2/So Yahoo adds an ISP and Google adds email/IM/sports-scores/stock-quotes.
What kind of "i's" and "t's" are you referring to as a bad thing?
Support for antiquated web browsers, often combined with Citrix is a personal nightmare and a royal PITA to test for. I've had to deal with MSIE 6 compatibility as recently as last year. This, obviously, was on some rinky dink locked down 6 years old PC used by back-office low-ranking clerical staff... Who's main job is to use our software.
It really limits what you can do as far as responsive UI if it has to degrade gracefully in MSIE 6, 7 or even 8. And given how many Win XP clients are still out there in corporate desktops, MSIE8 support is still going to be a thing for at least another year or two.
Another real annoyance is very slow deployment cycles. Getting client change control approval for even bug fix releases, let alone major upgrades is a real pain, doubly so if any hardware / resource requirements go up and now it's a capex line item that needs CFO approval. I envy the cloud folks.
From the sounds of it, you're running into how hard it is to balance security and usability. Personally, I prefer security, but I'm sure I'd say otherwise if someone was blocking me due to an old, outdated, policy.
As for antiquated web browsers, yeah, that's annoying. And it amazes me that there are companies out there who don't update their products, even when they're paid millions of dollars... Then there are the users who don't want to update....
> Another real annoyance is very slow deployment cycles. Getting client change control approval for even bug fix releases, let alone major upgrades is a real pain, doubly so if any hardware / resource requirements go up and now it's a capex line item that needs CFO approval. I envy the cloud folks.
That's not something I have had experience with. Sounds painful. Makes me glad to work in a smaller community college where I get to do mostly whatever I need to.
What happens is the application will end up requiring dozens of roles juggling easily a hundred (discrete) privileges.
The LDAP, AD, X.500 enterprise directory you have to integrate with will not have that granularity so a whole set of interfaces will be needed to map group(s) from the directory to role(s) and then you need an overlay to allow super users to customize the imported users.
And you somehow need to handle the case where user disappear from the directory without breaking auditing. And you need to grow bulk modification interfaces and import interfaces for those user/roles/privileges.
And then somehow make the UI human usable. And suddenly you'll need special "users" for anonymous session that are API launched, a whole API authentication layer and your load balancer now suddenly need to be session aware, and they want single-sign-on.
And we've not actually implemented any core functionality, just satisfied the security dude that this will be SoX/HIPPA/ISO-27001 compliant.