Over the next five years

Over the next five years, the company invested in a series of new products and acquisitions, expanding beyond the learning management system market. Among these: ANGEL Learning, an education software developer whose acquisition expanded Blackboard's client base to nearly 6,000 educational institutions, companies and government agencies. The company began providing its Blackboard Connect service in 2008, for use by school districts and higher education institutions to send out mass phone, text and e-mail notifications. The service can be used for routine alerts and notifications, academic or instructor notifications, or by school districts and communities to share time-sensitive information, such as in the case of natural disasters and campus emergencies. Enterprise software describes a collection of computer programs with common business applications, tools for modeling how the entire organization works, and development tools for building applications unique to the organization.  LMS is the framework that handles all aspects of the learning process. An LMS is the infrastructure that delivers and manages instructional content, identifies and assesses individual and organizational learning or training goals, tracks the progress towards meeting those goals, and collects and presents data for supervising the learning process of organization as a whole.