Official Google Blog: Introducing Google Buzz: “We’ve relied on other services’ openness in order to build Buzz (you can connect Flickr and Twitter from Buzz in Gmail), and Buzz itself is not designed to be a closed system. Our goal is to make Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations. We’re building on a suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API, and we invite developers to join us on Google Code to see what is available today and to learn more about how to participate. “

(Via Google Blog.)

While this looks a lot like twitter/brightkite/facebook activities, I do wonder if the real game-changer is integrating with Email – e.g. making Lifestream activities mainstream (though Facebook has become pretty mainstream) – or mainstream for people who haven’t necessarily sought out social networks.

I also wonder how this fits in with Wave? Is wave a technology platform under/in parallel to this? Slightly different? Just 2 teams at Google doing slightly different things “let a thousand flowers bloom and all that”?

This may be old news to others, but I finally have my copy of the new “Sakai Courseware Management” book (courtesy of the folks over at Packt) and more surprisingly have even been able to carve out time to read the contents. For people who may not have been aware, this is the book that Alan Berg & Michael Korkuska have spent the last many months of their lives churning out.

After looking through “Sakai Courseware Management”, I’d say if you’re a technical staff member working with Sakai it’d be invaluable. Finally, much of the community knowledge and resources have been distilled into a single volume, greatly shortening the learning curve — and with enough topics that even old-Sakai hands will likely see some new bits, courtesy of the deep knowledge of Alan & Michael.

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Google releases Wave protocol implementation source code – Ars Technica: “At the Google I/O conference earlier this year, the search giant revealed an intriguing new communication service called Wave that aims to deliver concurrent messaging and collaborative editing in a single cohesive environment. The underlying Wave Federation Protocol is designed to make it possible for third parties to host their own interoperable Wave instances. Google intends to open the source code of its own implementation in order to encourage widespread adoption of the protocol. The company took its first major steps in that direction on Friday by releasing the source code of its Operational Transform (OT) code and a simple client/server reference implementation that is built on top of the protocol. This code, which is available under the open source Apache Software License, will give developers a way to start experimenting with the protocol and potentially even building their own Wave-compatible services.”

(Via http://arstechnica.com.)

I hate to hop on the bandwagon, but I have to admit – Wave looks like the most revolutionary item I’ve seen in a while – in a full-on game changer sense. Not so much just because of the cool widgetry that Google’s built, but because it’s a protocol – with the flexibility and potential that implies.

Building on some of the interactions we’ve seen with IM, Blogging/Trackbacks, Twitter, and other messaging, Wave looks to standardize, federate, and embed real-time, multiparty communications to the point where it will become part of the fabric of the web. If Web 2.0 = comments and trackback conversations – this feels a lot more like Web 2.5 – the implementation we really wanted when we first tried to take the web from a document-based publishing platform to a conversation-enabled collaborative medium.

And… Open-Source production-quality reference implementation – what could be better. I have to say, not an small number of my off-work hours are going to be spent looking at embedding Wave into… everything… Particularly given that Federation (though still a little nebulous) is a first-class citizen in the platform.

Some interesting sakai-ux discussion tied in with thoughts I’ve been having recently related to native vs. integrated services and content in portal-type environments… where do the lines get drawn, and how do you handle horizontal services?

From a functionality/architecture point of view, the idea of loosly coupled integrations with external services like wikis, or Google Apps, or other tools seems very attractive.

however

There are significant horizontal capability components that while not impossible to resolve may complicate that scenario. Initial thoughts:

• TOS – ensuring users understand external, but integrated tools may have separate terms of service, SLAs, data ownership/retention policies, etc.
• import/export I think the ability to “package” and port a course/site/project or archive it is something that lots of people want. Again possible (treat external resources as links? Embed their content? Cry?) but I think it has some strong implications in user experience and architecture
• Search – this one might actually be a bit more straightforward

I will make the observation/parallel from the portal world – CampusEAI is currently heavily involved in building out a social portal, that combines the integration of enterprise services & applications with natively managed content like blogs, wikis, discussions, profile, etc. As we continue to get further down this road, some interesting intersections between user expectations and boundaries between external and internal content continue to present themselves up.

So far the balance we’ve come up with is largely – some stuff is in, some stuff is out, but there’s continual tension on the boarders of that distinction, and I’m not confident that that particular firewall will hold or be appropriate in the long run.

Not sure I have good answers for you Just a brain-dump of my internal thought processes these days.

Listening to Scott talk about CAS4 work and effort. Core items he’s mentioned look to be:

• Redesigned to better support non-CAS protocols (e.g. SAML, etc.)
• Increased emphasis on SAML as a product
• Better admin tools (service administration, workflow for registering services)
• Eased configuration (w/o needing to edit deployerContext.xml)
• Better extension points: captcha, “password expired” messages
• Governance and other changes

Scott’s mentioned the timeframe is end of this year, with Rutgers looking to go-live over the summer. Cas 3.3.x is still the production maintenance release, and there are intentions for a transition period, though some of the details have not yet been worked out.

ITWeb :Unisa embraces Microsoft: “[ Johannesburg, 3 December 2008 ] – At a time when many public organisations are migrating to open source solutions – the University of SA (Unisa) has chosen to embrace Microsoft. From 2009, registered students at Unisa will be required to sign up for a Microsoft-provided e-mail service. The free e-mail system – myLife – will be the only system Unisa will use to communicate with its students. This marks a move away from the university’s Sakai community source platform – myUnisa – which the university runs on a Linux platform.”

(Via car hire bulgariaGoogle.)

Based on the article at least (not having talked with the folks at UNISA about this item) it’s hard to tie moving to Live@EDU for email to moving away from Sakai. If anything, having guaranteed email accounts (which it sounds like may not currently be the case) seems likely to enhance core services like announcements, email notification, mailing lists and others.

Don’t Stop at Gmail | The Hoya: “Georgetown has never been on the cutting edge of technology. Changes to our e-mail system and wireless service have come slowly, and the university is still in the process of revamping data security following a major security breach last semester. Here is an opportunity to cut costs without sacrificing user satisfaction, to participate in a dynamic programming project involving some of the nation’s top universities and to shake off our dependence on a for-profit vendor for support and updates. Georgetown has the chance, for once, to be in the forefront of campus technology, and this is an opportunity we can’t afford to miss.”

(Via Google.)

Post from the Georgetown school paper makes the case for transitioning from Blackboard to an Open-Source LMS, and specifically mentions Sakai

We needed to populate some training course and class rosters into Sakai to let people play with site creation, roster attachment, and publishing tests to students. While we could have used webservices, we decided to leverage the built-in CmSyncJob and generate an XML file to dump out the data, and then sync it into the CMS (we wanted something easy to check into SVN for future usage).

The fun part was it let me use Ruby’s Builder (originally part of rails, but then extracted) to produce the XML, which was fun. Builder has a nice Ruby syntax that uses

to allow a nice language to XML mapping:

  puts "* Writing Academic Sessions..."

xml.tag!("academic-sessions") {
  2008.upto(2012) { |i|
    xml.tag!("academic-session") {
      xml.eid(i)
      xml.title("#{i-1}-#{i} School Year")
      xml.description("#{i-1}-#{i} School Year")
      xml.tag!("start-date","6/1/#{i-1}")
      xml.tag!("end-date", "8/31/#{i}")</pre>

And just run though a bunch of loops, and pretty clean method calls to spit out XML.

Thanks to http://blog.katipo.co.nz/?p=29 for the tips on Builder, especially the bit about using

to put in names which would translate to Ruby keywords (e.g.

where the - makes it

otherwise)

ландшафт. the exhaustion that was the combined CampusEAI Portlets2008 and Annual conference is now behind us, and it seems like time for some reflections and observations. Hopefully some of these items will be items which I expand upon at a future date, but in no particular order, dumped straight from my brain:

• JSR-168 is here! Everyone really wants to write good standards compliant portlets. Architecture and engineering is a harder sell (or at least the time/cost trade-off) but there’s wide consensus that standard portlets are the way forward — at least excepting a couple of us widget fans
• SOA is something people are interested in, but that there’s been relatively little forward progress on. Some is governance. Some is tools (SOAP, WSDL, and what’s this REST thing?). Some is just that it’s big and strategic, and there’s many tactical must haves. I suspect some of it is also that much of our interesting data/services are locked in vendor platforms that have shown little interest in opening up. Though, a small trend does exist of creating SOA-style services to reach into vendor platforms and extract data from them
• Mobile wasn’t as big as I thought it would be. Not sure why. Most people seem to be interested in the abstract, but with few concrete plans. Maybe my iPhone has clouded my vision, but I do wonder if we’re going to get blindsided come fall — our target demographic is basically 18-22 year olds, afterall…
• AJAX in portlets is still hard. There are some tricks like wrapper divs, namespacing, and builtin support and integration patterns, but it’s still not a common practice.
• Identity Management is big. Governance is a big thorny issue, though many IT departments are rolling out vendor products from big players (Oracle, Sun, a little IBM) in the interim, tho ugh the exact scope of those items is somewhat unclear.
• Oracle is really putting portlets in lots of interesting places. Webcenter. Product mashups. Inside BI tools, and other GUI devices. I think they’ve probably embraced the architecture more than any other major vendor which is an interesting trend.
• Lots of awareness, and wanting to look at uPortal 3. Ooohs and ahhs over both the AJAX D&D, and maybe more importantly the new content adding UI — good going Jen!
• Really beautiful portals — some, though not all new portals really seem to be breaking out of the lots of boxes approach, or at least wrapping it in neat functionality like Boston College’s Agora design. Nifty trend. Sign of maturity?
• Community Development is hard. Aligning roadmaps, agreeing on implementation strategies, and putting all the pieces together is challenging. Even more so, justifying “doing it right” (and fit to share) versus quick and dirty, or getting a student up and running was a big trend. Makes my inner-engineer quail, but my inner-economist says that throw-away code lowers the barrier for solving problems, which is a good thing. Evolution isn’t always pretty and all that.
• Lots of desire for training, best practices, and advice on policy and governance. Real role for communities of practice, not just code and software.
• Increasing interest in “Enterprise Learning Management”. Lots of worries about migration, but the beginning of seeds wondering whether our current platforms are sufficient for a foundation for the next 10-15 years, and University strategic goals. Of course, some of this is the “enterprise IT guys” getting pulled into the LMS discussion for perhaps the first time in many places.
• Good beer is key to facilitating interesting non-session discussion. Content is king on the program, but largely only because it gets people in one place and produces interesting spontaneous interactions. Hands-on is something everyone wants, but it’s not clear a conference composed of many 1 hour sessions is the right format to deliver it.
• University IT teams wear many, many hats.
• British Universities seem to have a much richer and more abundent IT project management structure than (most) American schools. Really interesting thread about Imperial College in London blending ITIL and Agile methodologies.

A week or so ago, I got an email from a friend:

????????Just in case you haven’t noticed this yet, Google links to jay.shao.org now include warnings about malware: Jason E. Shao » Blog Archive » Sakai SVN Vendor Branch Outcome This site may harm your computer. Jul 17, 2007 … Soo… yesterday I completed my 2.3.1 Sakai vendor branch merge, … I had to use the trunk version of svn_load_dirs.pl and patch it — see Bug … jay.shao.org/archives/2007/07/17/sakai-svn-vendor-branch-outcome – Similar pages – Note this

The best kind of warnings are the ones you get about something you’re aware of, trying to fix, and hoping no one will notice. In this case, working through the baroque malware site removal process. How did I get dragged into it? Well…

I didn’t actually notice until I browsed to my blog using Firefox 3 (been my default browser for a while now — I really like Safari too, but Firefox 3 is not you’re daddy’s Mac Firefox) and got slammed with a really obnoxious error message noting that the site was suspected of malware. The page looks a lot like the kind you get nowadays when you visit a site with a self-signed certificate, except there was no way to dismiss it (but use Safari…). About the same time, I noticed that Google search results included the note referenced above. So, naturally I read in a bit to try and figure out how to get rid of it. Well…

1. Visit stopmalware.org
2. Read a pretty long written description
3. Find no way to identify what triggered the malware warning on my site
4. Submit a request to re-examine to try and get some contact.
5. twiddle…
6. Get a message back identifying a single problem with the site
7. Fix said problem (bad iFrame, possibly copy & pasted)
8. Submit a 2nd request to re-examine
9. twiddle…
10. Get another message back identifying a different, specific problem (not mentioned the first time)
11. Fix said problem
12. Submit a 3rd request to re-examine
13. twiddle…
14. exoneration (no notification though) all is well with the web

So, aside from my personal irritation at this process I thought I’d add some mentions based upon some customer service observations:

• not being able to find out what you did wrong is really irritating
• not being able to find out all the things you did wrong makes it worse
• internet accessing processes that require real-people time makes them feel really frustrating