[Portfolio] Community feedback needed on proposed changes to OSP in Sakai 2.9

[Ward, Lynn E.]

Greetings all,

At a recent OSP community meeting, a proposal was made to hide and/or stealth OSP components that are not fully developed or well-supported. Hiding these components will make it easier for current and/or new OSP adopters to support the OSP environment). The following specific recommendations were made as part of this proposal:

  1.  In the Portfolios tool, hide the "Design your own portfolio" option.  This functionality has never worked well, and as far as we know, few if any institutions are using it.  There is already a Sakai property that hides this feature.  We are proposing to hide the "design your own" option by default, but any institution that wants to use it can simply change the property setting in their local instance.
  2.  Stealth the Portfolio Layouts tool.  If the "design your own" option is disabled, there is no need for the Portfolio layouts to be available in portfolio sites.  If stealthed in the 2.9, any institution that wants to continue offering the "design your own" option, can unstealth the tool in their local instance.
  3.  Stealth the Wizards tool.   Many institutions have dropped support for Wizards and instead direct their users to the Matrices tool, which is the more feature-rich and flexible of the two tools at this point.  At one time the Matrices and Wizards tools were very similar, but the differences between them is now so pronounced that they pose a support and training challenge for many institutions.   Here again, any institution can choose to unstealth and continue to use  the Wizards  tool in their local instance.

Before we proceed with any of these changes, we want to find out whether  any of them will pose a problem for existing OSP users.  Also, if these tools continue to be part of the core Sakai distribution, they could benefit from further testing and development.  We therefore would encourage the institutions who rely on them to consider devoting QA and development resources to maintain them.

Please feel free to send your comments and feedback to this list or join us for an upcoming weekly meeting [1].  If no objections are raised by Friday, January 13, we will move forward with implementing these changes in the 2.9 release.

[1] https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/OSP/Portfolio+%28OSP%29+Meetings

Best regards,

Lynn




==========================
Lynn Ward, Principal Systems Analyst
Instructional Technology Systems and Services
University Information Technology Services<http://uits.iu.edu/>
Indiana University
Information Technology and Communications Complex (IT 342J)
535 West Michigan Street, Indianapolis, IN 46202
Phone: 317-278-5713  E-mail: leward at iupui.edu<mailto:leward at iupui.edu>
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