[Announcements] Apereo Newsletter December 20, 2013

Fri Dec 20 11:56:18 PST 2013

Apereo Newsletter

December 20, 2013

Announcements

1.  Call for Proposals for Open Apereo 2014

2.  Time to Get Registered for Apereo Camp 2014!

3.  Sakai-Turnitin Integration

Projects

4.  OAE in Argentina

5.  VI Spanish Sakai Madrid '13

6.  Apereo Advisory Council

7.  Open Position: IT Specialist at Seminole State College, Florida

Community

8.  uPortal 4.0.13 GA Announcement

9.  Sakai 10 Planning has Started!

10. Apereo OAE Alpine Swift is Now Available!

11. uPortal Documentation Highlights

12. Sakai Screencast Webinar Recording

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Announcements

1.  Call for Proposals for Open Apereo 2014

"Innovate. Incubate. Implement."
Community Blossoms at Open Apereo 2014
Hilton Downtown - Miami, Florida
June 1-4, 2014

Get ready to share your success stories at our Open Apereo 2014 conference
in Miami, Florida! This year's conference will be held in one of the
world's most popular vacation spots. It offers multiple enticements for
everyone, the trendy nightlife, the Art Deco district, the rich culture,
and its renowned food. Mark your calendars (June 1-4, 2014) and join us
this year at the Open Apereo 2014 Conference. We invite you to submit a
proposal now:  https://www.concentra-cms.com/cfp/p/OpenApereo2014

Come learn about -- and share your experience with -- the many projects and
activities within the Apereo community that support the academic mission:

- Sakai 10 with tools to encourage teaching, learning, research, and
collaboration
- uPortal to present a unified view of campus services
- CAS to offer single sign-on to multiple online resources
- Bedework to deliver a robust calendaring solution
- uMobile, a framework for innovative mobile solutions
- Apereo OAE, a next-generation platform to promote online communication
and collaboration
- and more!

We welcome your proposals. Share your great work with the community,
explore effective teaching practices, and spark new developments and
innovation through a presentation session, lightning talks, showcase night
demo, or a birds of a feather (BOF) discussion session.  We are also
offering a new format: "flipped" presentation. In addition to traditional
presentations, interested presenters can apply the flipped teaching method
to a presentation session by offering the presentation for attendees
"online" before the conference and use the face-to-face session in Miami
for deeper discussion, collaboration, and learning.

The deadline for submissions is February 7, 2014.  Proposals entered by
January 21 will be eligible for early review decisions by February 1.

The Apereo Conference in Miami is a global networking point for
practitioners. There will be opportunities during and around the conference
for meeting, sharing, and learning from others in our global community. A
special pre-conference gathering will feature presentations in Spanish from
Latin America and Spain.

We look forward to your proposal!

https://www.concentra-cms.com/cfp/p/OpenApereo2014

Sincerely,

Ian Dolphin, Executive Director, Apereo Foundation
Laura McCord, Open Apereo 2014 Planning Committee Chair
Reba-Anna Lee, Open Apereo 2014 Program Committee Co-chair
Alan Regan, Open Apereo 2014 Program Committee Co-chair

2.  Time to Get Registered for Apereo Camp 2014!

January 27-29, 2014 - 2 1/2 days of "BarCamp" style workshop sessions
January 29-30, 2014 - 1 1/2 days of developer/implementer collaboration

Phoenix, Arizona
Arizona State University -- Polytechnic Campus
The Start Up Labs --Technology Center
Located in Mesa, Arizona (just outside Phoenix)

Registration and Details: http://apereocamp.eventbrite.com/

What is "Apereo Camp"?

Apereo has always been about people coming together to share and learn in
an open environment, and this is what our "Camp" event is all about. This
event is a flexible set of workshop sessions in which the content is
provided by the participants. The detailed planning of the sessions will
occur at the beginning of the event.

Apereo Camp provides both planned and spontaneous opportunities to
collaborate on all Apereo community projects and initiatives, as well as
ones from other open source communities as well.

This will be our seventh year running this community event (going back to
the Jasig Unconference events). So, make plans to join us and register now!

What are we going to do?

Apereo Camp consists primarily of a variety of concurrent face-to-face
sessions occurring throughout the day. Some sessions may have more formal
presentations. Most sessions involve heavy interaction with the audience as
a whole. The list of topics, presenters and facilitators is dynamic and the
final schedule will be determined in real-time, interactively with the
attendees. Topics will likely include:

- Project updates, roadmap planning, and implementer/developer
collaboration on a wide range of Apereo community projects (and other
related projects), including: Bedework, CAS, Open Academic Environment
(OAE), OpenRegistry, Portlets, Sakai CLE, Student Success Plan (SSP),
uMobile, uPortal, Grouper, Opencast, Shibboleth, etc.
- Sessions on more general domains, themes, and concepts, such as Teaching
and Learning, Openness and Open Source (2/3/98 Project), Identity and
Access Management, Mobile web/application usage, development
tools/techniques, and other general areas of technical interest.
- Professional networking and community building!

OK, I'm interested! What do I do next?

- Register here:
http://www.eventbrite.com/e/apereo-camp-2014-tickets-8570726273
- Make your travel arrangement.
- Get ready for some great collaboration.

A discounted registration fee is available for attendees from institutions
that are members of the Apereo Foundation. If you are an Apereo member, use
this link:

http://www.eventbrite.com/e/apereo-camp-2014-tickets-8570726273?discount=ApereoMember

or the code "ApereoMember" for registration.

Also, add yourself as an attendee on Lanyrd.

See you at Apereo Camp 2014!

John A. Lewis
john.lewis at apereo.org

3.  Sakai-Turnitin Integration

Dear Colleagues,

In recent months members of several Sakai lists have expressed concern
regarding integration with Turnitin. As a result of a conversation between
Turnitin and the University of Oxford, I am pleased to announce an
initiative to consolidate effort around a new Sakai-Turnitin integration,
which has the working title of TS2. Please see the letter copied below from
Turnitin for further details

Oxford have agreed to coordinate the Sakai community effort, but need help
from the broader community to realize the new integration. If your
institution uses Turnitin integrated with Sakai, please consider:

- Adding your contact details to the confluence page at:

https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/TII/Home

This will include you in the mailing list to support this activity.

- Contacting Adam Marshall at the University of Oxford (
adam.marshall at it.ox.ac.uk ) to volunteer resource to help the effort.
Development, code review, documentation and testing are all needed -- as
are early adopters. Please consider the roles your institution could play.

This initiative offers an opportunity to coordinate efforts across the
Sakai Community to meet a widely expressed need. Please contribute
accordingly.

Best,

Ian Dolphin
Executive Director, Apereo Foundation

ian.dolphin at apereo.org

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Letter from Turnitin

Dear Sakai Community,

Turnitin and the Sakai community would like to announce their intention to
collaborate on the development of a new Turnitin-Sakai integration. Via
this project, all integration efforts will be concentrated to a single
focused project, thus relieving support for the multiple forks of the
integration that exist currently. This concentration will greatly improve
the level of access the Sakai community have to Turnitin engineers for
assistance.

Development of the new Turnitin/Sakai integration (TS2) will be coordinated
by the University of Oxford. The integration will be based on a newly
released Turnitin SDK and underlying new API.

Support for the TS2 integration will be provided by the TS2 team through
the normal Sakai community channels.

Turnitin's engineering team, based in the UK, will provide direct support
to the lead developers in the TS2 community for the Turnitin API and
Turnitin SDKs; working closely with them to ensure there is a fully
compliant initial implementation of the integration. Queries regarding the
integration created by the TS2 team, institution specific changes to the
integration, and modifications or feature requests should be directed to
the appropriate Sakai development forum for TS2, instead of Turnitin. The
Turnitin team will not directly work on the TS2 integration, but will
support the community leaders in their use of the API and SDKs through the
TS2 team.

We would encourage members of the community who want to develop a Turnitin
integration to contribute to TS2.

To best provide community support for the Sakai integration, Turnitin will
focus our support on the TS2 effort and is deprecating our support on
older, less well supported, integration efforts developed against the
legacy API, effective October 1, 2013. We recommend that institutions
migrate to TS2 as soon as it is available for general adoption (GA). We
will continue to provide ad hoc support for existing integrations through
December 31, 2013, and suggest that everyone migrate to the TS2
implementation by December 31, 2014 at latest. The legacy API that the
current integrations are implemented with will be retired no earlier than
December 2015. Any institutions concerned about this change in support
should contact their Turnitin representative to ensure that their plans for
continued use are not disrupted.

Regards,

Turnitin

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Community

4.  OAE in Argentina

Hello everyone,

At the end of September, OAE was implemented for the first time in
Argentina.

http://tenant1.irice-conicet.gov.ar

Really excellent!

Regards,

Guillermo

PhD. Guillermo Rodríguez
IRICE: CONICET - UNR
guille at fceia.unr.edu.ar

5.  VI Spanish Sakai Madrid '13

The VI Spanish Sakai meeting was held in Madrid during the 7th and 8th of
November. Seven Spanish Universities (Universidad Católica San Antonio,
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Universidad de Murcia, Universidad
Internacional de la Rioja, Universidad Pública de Navarra, Universitat de
Lleida and Universitat Politècnica de València) and two commercial
affiliates (Asahi International and Samoo) actively participated in the
event, which helped them to strength their relations.

Alex Ballesté wrote a review (in English) which summarizes the best moments
of the event. The sessions were recorded and the YouTube links are included.

http://aballeste.blogspot.com.es/2013/11/thoughts-about-vi-spanish-sakai-madrid.html

I personally want to thank Mr. Ian Dolphin and Mr. Neal Caidin for their
continuous support to the S2U and the Spanish Community. Also, thank you to
the sponsors that made the event possible: Asahi International, Samoo and
Unitech. We are updating confluence with more information about the event.

José Mariano Luján González
jmariano at um.es

6.  Apereo Advisory Council

Dear Apereans,

I am delighted to announce that we have empaneled an Advisory Council for
the foundation. The purpose of the group is to gather bright, knowledgeable
people who are removed from the daily fray of running Apereo projects, and
often from the council and the community, to provide advice and perspective
on the foundation's activities.

In the interest of balancing global representation with manageable time
zones for meeting purposes, this first group is primarily North American,
with some representation from Europe and Africa. Over time, we expect to
spin up several regional advisory councils, with the next one likely to be
concentrated in the Asia/Pacific region.

Here is your new Advisory Council:

- Kimberly Arnold, Evaluation Consultant, University of Wisconsin
- Lois Brooks, Vice Provost of Information Services, Oregon State University
- Laura Cierniewicz, Director of the Centre for Educational Technology,
University of Cape Town
- Tedd Dodds, CIO, Cornell University
- Kent Eaton, Provost, McPherson College
- Stuart Lee, Deputy CIO, IT Services, Oxford University
- Patrick Masson, General Manager, Open Source Initiative
- Lisa Ruud, Associate Provost, Empire Education Association

Kindest regards,

Michael Feldstein
michael at mfeldstein.com

7.  Open Position: IT Specialist at Seminole State College of Florida

We have an open position for an Instructional Technology Specialist at
Seminole State College of Florida, located in the Orlando area.  Please
pass along to anyone you know who might be interested in applying!

http://www.seminolestate.edu/hr/jobs/?id=102125

Joni Miller, M.A.
Associate Director, eLearning
Seminole State College
millerjm at seminolestate.edu

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Projects

8.  uPortal 4.0.13 GA Announcement

Apereo is proud to announce uPortal 4.0.13, a continuation of our regular
patch releases of uPortal 4.0.

Features and Changes of Note
- [UP-3774] - Bundle announcement portlet
- [UP-3799] - Upgrade weather portlet to 1.1.0
- [UP-3779] - Enhance json.xsl (JSON rendering theme) to include info about
portlets that are not within tabs and columns

Updating from 4.0.0-4.0.5

If you have data you care about in the UP_LOGIN_EVENT_AGGREGATE table
please back it up externally or rename the table before executing the
following steps. db-update will drop this table.

After configuring your uPortal 4.0.13 source run: - ant db-update
Downloads: http://www.jasig.org/uportal/download/uportal-4013
Release Notes: https://wiki.jasig.org/display/UPC/4.0.13
Maven Project Site: http://developer.jasig.org/projects/uportal/4.0.13/

Full Release Notes

Release Notes - uPortal - Version 4.0.13

Bugs
- [UP-3562] - Portlet Manager -- Using a comma within a portlet preference
value has the effect of splitting that value in two
- [UP-3581] - The new example LDAP config in ldapContext.xml doesn't seem
to play well with SimpleLdapSecurityContext
- [UP-3707] - Bundle Announcement Portlet in uPortal 4.1
- [UP-3716] - Test failures with Java 7
- [UP-3760] - Adding portlet on locked tab/column
- [UP-3767] - Mobile search URL incorrect
- [UP-3769] - Layout import fails
- [UP-3775] - CLONED from SSP - Permissons Editing Not Visible in IE
- [UP-3788] - uportal-maven-plugin does not properly copy MANIFEST.MF files
within war files handled by deploy-ear
- [UP-3799] - Upgrade weather portlet to 1.1.0
- [UP-3815] - Manage Portlets displays 'setParameters.deleteButton' in Edit
Parameters
- [UP-3823] - Enhance UP-3701 and/or change logging initialization of
Listener classes

Improvement
- [UP-3741] - Simplify PortletExecutionEvent creation
- [UP-3743] - Provide additional information for unhandled exceptions at
the Web Intercepter
- [UP-3757] - Use JDK7 chmod in maven build
- [UP-3779] - Enhance json.xsl (JSON rendering theme) to include info about
portlets that are not within tabs and columns
- [UP-3841] - Make background preferences use thumbnails instead of actual
wallpaper images
- [UP-3842] - Change CSS so that background image from background
preferences displays without scrolling

New Feature
- [UP-3762] - Add ability for users to select a background image to apply
to desktop and mobile pages
- [UP-3774] - Bundle announcement portlet
- [UP-3785] - Implement Background Changer portlet on mobile web

Story
- [UP-3721] - Create TinCan API Data Model
- [UP-3730] - Create mapping of uPortal events to TinCan API Verbs
- [UP-3734] - Create unit tests to verify TinCan API objects transform into
the correct JSON structures
- [UP-3784] - Google Analytics issue if you have more than one host
- [UP-3843] - Issue with search aggregation if someone searches for a space

Tim Levett
levett at wisc.edu

9. Sakai 10 Planning has Started!

Sakai 10 is the successor to Sakai 2.9. A schedule with target milestones
has been approved and the scope, which features will be included and which
will not be included, is nearing full definition.

A summary of status is at:

https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/REL/Sakai+10+Release+Schedule+and+Scope

Thanks,

Neal Caidin
Sakai Community Coordinator
neal.caidin at apereo.org

10. Apereo OAE Alpine Swift is Now Available!

The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project team is excited to
announce the second major release of the Apereo Open Academic Environment;
OAE Alpine Swift or OAE 2.0.

Apereo OAE Alpine Swift brings a wide range of user-facing improvements
such as:

- Following
- Video support
- Terms and Conditions
- A number of usability refinements
- Internationalization and Accessibility improvements

Try it out

OAE Alpine Swift can be experienced on the project's QA server at:
http://oae.oae-qa0.oaeproject.org. It is worth noting that this server is
actively used for testing and will be wiped and redeployed every night.

The source code has been tagged with version number 2.0.0 and can be
downloaded from the following repositories:

Back end: https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/tree/2.0.0

Front end: https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/tree/2.0.0

Documentation on how to install the system can be found at:
https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/blob/2.0.0/README.md .

The repository containing all deployment scripts can be found at:
https://github.com/oaeproject/puppet-hilary .

Changelog

Following

It is now possible to follow other people, allowing for important and
public activities from that person to be shown in your personal activity
feed. This provides a way to learn more about the collaboration in which
your peers are involved, and offers an opportunity for serendipitous
discovery of content, discussions, people and groups at the same time.

Video Support

An integration with MediaCore (http://mediacore.com) is now available,
allowing for all videos to be uploaded and played inside of OAE. The
integration makes it possible for uploaded videos to be transferred to and
processed by MediaCore, generating a thumbnail and video that can be played
in all browsers. This video is delivered to the OAE user interface through
the MediaCore video player.

The MediaCore video support can be enabled and configured on a
tenant-by-tenant basis through the administration UI.

Terms and Conditions

A Terms and Conditions agreement feature is now available. If configured,
this agreement is presented to all users when they sign in for the first
time and they will need to accept it before they can use the system. The
terms and conditions can be internationalized in multiple languages at the
same time.

The Terms and Conditions agreement can be enabled and configured on a
tenant-by-tenant basis through the administration UI.

My Groups

The My Groups page now follows the same behaviour as the My Library and My
Discussions pages when being viewed by other people. Only groups that can
already be seen by the person viewing your My Groups page will be shown.

Monitoring

Integration with Google Analytics is now available out of the box, allowing
for a better understanding around usage patterns and total usage to be
gained. This can be enabled and configured on a tenant-by-tenant basis
through the administration UI.

TinCan API

OAE is now capable of pushing activities to a Learning Record Store using
the TinCan (http://tincanapi.com) or Experience API. This API is a new
specification for learning technology that makes it possible to collect
data about the wide range of experiences a person has (online and offline).
This API captures data in a consistent format about a person or group's
activities from many technologies, of which OAE is now one.

The TinCan API support can be enabled and configured on a tenant-by-tenant
basis through the administration UI.

Internationalization

The OAE project has decided to adopt Crowdin (
http://crowdin.net/project/apereo-oae) as its official translation
platform. This allows for OAE to be translated through the Crowdin web UI
without needing to set up a local development environment.

In addition to making it easy to translate all of the OAE keys, it provides
translation suggestions based on a Translation Knowledge Base and machine
translations. Crowdin provides a very useful overview of the translation
completeness of the different supported languages and makes it easy to see
which keys still need to be translated. A synchronisation script has also
been provided that will automatically make new keys available to Crowdin
and will pull the newest translations into the code base.

Through this Crowdin integration, OAE Alpine Swift includes the following
complete translations:

- Catalan
- Chinese
- Dutch
- French
- German
- Spanish
- Valencian

A special thanks goes to Frederic Dooremont, Toni Devís López, Samuel
Gutiérrez Jiménez-Peña, Harry Wang, Yildiray Ogurol and Mark Breuker for
providing these translations.

Finally, OAE will now also automatically detect the preferred language
based on the user's browser settings, according to internationalization
best practices. We will only default to the language configured in the
admin UI if this has not been set.

CSV User Import

A tenant can now be pre-populated with a large set of users by uploading a
CSV user file. These accounts can be associated with a specific
authentication strategy and existing accounts will not be overridden. The
CSV upload can be done by a global or a tenant administrator.

Usability Improvements

A long list of usability refinements have been added. Some of the more
notable ones are:
- Improved previews for activity feed items
- Improved button wording and clarity
- Automatic link recognition in comments and discussions
- Keyboard accessibility improvements (e.g., refocusing modal triggers
after modal is closed)
- etc.

Automated testing

A number of improvements have been made to the automated QUnit tests,
including making sure that all tests are automatically run after every
commit.

Get in touch

The project website can be found at  http://www.oaeproject.org. The project
blog will be updated with the latest project news from time to time, and
can be found at  http://www.oaeproject.org/blog.

The mailing list used for Apereo OAE is oae-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org.
You can subscribe to the mailing list at
http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/oae-dev.

Bugs and other issues can be reported in our issue tracker at:
https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/issues.

Nicolaas Matthijs
nicolaas.matthijs at caret.cam.ac.uk

11. uPortal Documentation Highlights

If you were unable to attend the last uPortal Community Call in October,
here are some of the latest documentation entries that were highlighted:

Google Analytics for versions 4.0.12+
https://wiki.jasig.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=60653606(Tom Freestone,
BYU)

Continuous Deployment using RPMS
https://wiki.jasig.org/display/UPM40/RPMs+to+Manage+Deployments

Jenkins Continuous Deployment (Tim Levett, UW-Madison)
https://wiki.jasig.org/display/UPM40/Jenkins+to+Manage+Deployments

New Sidebar Features (Julien Gribonvald)
https://wiki.jasig.org/display/UPM40/Sidebar

"Packaged Stuff" Updates (Nicoll Ross, The University of Edinburgh)
https://wiki.jasig.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=52101296

What's Needed?

We really need more portlet documentation. If you have any notes that help
clarify a portlet's installation and configuration please send me any
information.

Also, the Jenkins Continuous Deployment manual entry was written based on a
conference session given at the Open Apereo 2013 Conference in San Diego.
If you want to learn more about a particular conference session and would
like to see the topic documented in the manual, please feel free to send me
the topic and we will try to gather enough information to write a
documentation entry.

We are also trying to expand our Developer's Manual:
https://wiki.jasig.org/display/UPM40/Developer's+Guide . If you have any
development tips, tricks, or testing tools that you use with uPortal and/or
portlet development, we would love to hear about it.

Interested in writing a manual page? There is a new Style Guide:
https://wiki.jasig.org/display/UPM40/Documentation+Style+Guideavailable to
assist you with writing your topic of interest.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or ideas.

Many Thanks.

Sincerely,

Laura McCord
lmccord at ucmerced.edu
uPortal Documentation Coordinator

12. Sakai Screencast Webinar Recording

Hi everyone,

The slide deck and link to the video tutorial on screen casting and other
videos are available online at:

http://www.brutuspartners.com/free-training-content.html

Thanks,

Kara Stiles
kstiles at brutuspartners.com
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