[Building Sakai] Announcing Dashboard 1.0.0

[Chris Kretler]

Hello all,

We are happy to announce the 1.0.0 release of the Sakai Dashboard.  The 
Dashboard is a Contrib tool that provides a user-centric synoptic view 
of "Assignments and Events" -- showing upcoming Assignments and Calendar 
Events -- and "Recent Activity" -- showing updates about  Resources, 
Drop Box files, Assignments and Announcements.  The Dashboard provides 
the end user a concise landing spot with links to their most pertinent 
content.  It also gives the user the ability to customize the interface 
by starring important items and hiding less critical ones.

An overview video can be found here: http://vimeo.com/39203463

The 1.0.0 tag of the Dashboard shows activity related to resources, 
assignments, announcements and calendar events.  With a modest 
development effort, activity related to other types of Sakai entities 
could be shown in the Dashboard.  We will provide up-to-date information 
about that process in confluence.

The Dashboard has been through several rounds of functional testing.  
Most known issues have been fixed.  There has been no attempt at load 
testing and we would welcome any input from a group with the resources 
to perform load testing.

The 1.0.0 tag can be downloaded from subversion at this URL: 
https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/dashboard/tags/1.0.0/

The 1.0.0 version of the Dashboard will build and deploy with an 
unpatched version of sakai trunk or with a patched version of sakai 
2.9.x.  Revisions are needed in sakai core and kernel to build with 
2.9.x.  Information about patching the 2.9.x branch of sakai or any tag 
made from that branch can be found in this confluence page: 
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/x/zYHSB

Details of the Dashboard project are described in this confluence page:  
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/x/zIWCB

Bugs and other issues related to the Dashboard are tracked in this JIRA 
project: https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/DASH

Unresolved issues related to the Dashboard can be found here:  
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/x/xYHSB

We plan to release a 1.0.1 tag of the Dashboard very soon.  We expect to 
include fixes for some or all of the following tickets in the 1.0.1 tag:

    https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/DASH-216 - Need to expire and 
purge dashboard items
    https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/DASH-225 - "View in Site" link 
for announcements does not open in site
    https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/DASH-228 - Dropbox items shown 
too widely with confusing info
    https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/DASH-220 - Hidden announcements 
shown in dashboard under some circumstances
    https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/DASH-227 - Entity creator does 
not see some items in dashboard if entity access is restricted by group 
and creator is not in group

Additional work has been outlined for inclusion in a 1.1 version of the 
Dashboard, but the scope of that work remains undecided and no timetable 
has been set.

We invite contributions of effort to complete further versions of the 
Dashboard, including the 1.0.2 release (if needed) and the 1.1 version.

- The Dashboard Project Team