As Blackboard develops the GUI for future releases, including the Ultra Experience (navigation scheme), they need to understand how their client institutions are using tabs and modules, along with institution roles, to target information delivery and "branding." This is a forum to post your use cases, and to explain what you are doing to assign institution roles and associate them with brands, themes, tabs, modules and whatever else.
Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY. 16,000 students, 1200 faculty/staff/designers/etc.
Currently Bb 9.1 Q2 2016. We are transitioning to Bb SaaS (Continuous Delivery), due for Spring 2018.
At Eastern Kentucky University, we have used branding to customize the top frame image and the main tabs seen by four different communities of users. We assign the primary institution role when accounts are created, from SIS or batch user creation file, and manually adjust them when users complain that they do not have the right brand. After a user logs in, the landing page contains a module for system announcements, My Courses, My Organizations, My Announcements, and any other modules targeted to that user's institution role(s). We use secondary institution roles to control the availability of about a dozen modules on various tabs, such as the modules for course evaluations, where the modules to be shown to instructors and students are completely different. Our help desk staff have both a specific system role (to grant privileges to the System Admin tab) and a special institution role (to provide them with a tab for information about their responsibilities). We do not currently use the institutional hierarchy, and we have made very few customizations to the 2012 Theme.