PR-GB.com… News from origin – Hobsons Debuts Full CAS Integration at CGS Annual Meeting: “”

(Via Google.)

Another vendor server higher-ed supporting CAS out of the box can only be a good thing easing integration across the board.

Blackboard Is Losing Customers, but What Does It Mean? at e-Literate

“The big loss appears to be unambiguously in Blackboard Basic licenses. One factor that theoretically might have contributed to this loss is consolidation of Basic licenses under a consortial Enterprise license. In this case, the loss of a license wouldn’t equal the loss of a customer. But according to Mr. Stanton, the number of Basic license losses due to consortial consolidation in the last year was ‘immaterial’ because Blackboard currently only supports a very small number of consortial licenses. So it looks like the drop in Basic licenses really does represent a loss of customers.”

I was really surprised to find out that Blackboard Basic customers don’t get LDAP authentication — it’s a feature I certainly expect in pretty much any serious product at this point. In particular, given the recent focus on Identity Management (IdM), it seems that many institutions would be hard-pressed to even consider any products that don’t integrate within a broader campus authentication strategy. Additionally, with LDAP being such a widely-deployed standard, the marginal cost of the feature has to approach $0.

Fortunately, with Sakai converging on the Unicon JLDAP provider, this is a story that we’re at least getting better at, though in the past we’ve suffered from an embarrassment of riches in this area.

I was reviewing the excellent work Unicon’s Gary Thompson has done in developing personas related to uPortal (really they seem applicable across Higher-Education), which jogged my to write about some thinking: leveraging well-developed UE personas to build a suite of synthetic test-data.

User Experience is often not fully integrated within other aspects of the software development lifecycle, due to user experience’s ambiguous relationship with the “hard-types”. One aspect that stands out however is the similarity between UE personas and good sets of synthetic test data. Both seek to identify, quantify, and provide a means for verifying functionality against common scenarios and edge cases. Also, both are a lot of work to do well.

In work within the context of the uPortal project — I’ve begun to wonder whether involving the UE personas in the generation of seeding our test data might have some nice synergies.

Benefits:

• Focus developers on UE personas during testing
• Provide iteritive development & refinement of personas and test data
• Provide common language for uniting UE tasks & developer edge-cases
• More tightly integrate functional and UAT testing scenarios

In the case of uPortal, very simple test data has always shipped with the project, generic accounts for “student” “admin” “faculty” and the like. How much richer would our demonstration and design capabilities be if we actually had an accounts for Owen Oldschool which developers could test against that defaulted to larger fonts, and had a UAT script that tested the contextual help?

In open-source in particular, where there’s been a historical disconnect between the design/UE community, it seems like trying to integrate out tools, processes, and language could show great benefits.

John Lewis from Unicon talked about open-source in Universities. Higher Ed has an extremely complex, dynamic, organizational structures. uPortal has grouping and other mechanisms which are more sophisticated than other projects, battle tested for large and sophisticated higher-ed deployments. CAS was one of the first systems, has features like Proxy Auth that no one else has, and is widely adopted — integrated into commercial and other frameworks like ACEGI. Hypercontent – why another CMS? Hypercontent separates content management from presentation, CAS enabled, reuses uPortal GAP, portlet content & management tools. Continue Reading »

I wish uPortal did X. How do I (as a deployer/user) ensure uPortal evolves to better address my needs? How does the uPortal community uncover user needs, especially those specific to higher-education? The uPortal community has attempted to answer these questions via an open, ongoing process. This presentation provides an overview of the uPortal Requirements Gathering and Development effort. Topics addressed include background, goals, roles, and deliverables.

Abstract

• History – What prompted this process, and how was it developed?

• Goals

• Transparent process
• Increase user involvement
• Harness community resources
• Sustainable development

• vision statements
• requirements library
• use cases
• timelines

• Gathering initial requirements
• Reviewing/refining requirements
• Implementing requirements