[Using Sakai] Using Sakai - Scheduling the January Call for Sakai Documentation Redesign project

[Regan, Alan]

Hi, John and Seth.

Thank you for providing this information.  Given the timing of the 2.8 release, I can see how this documentation redesign project might not meet your deadlines right now.  That said, there's no time like the present to get started and plan for improvements moving forward.

John, I very much like the notion of a central repository.  Although I missed the last conference call (I wasn't able to jump in until the very end), I believe there was a conversation about IU's knowledgebase.  Checking the Etherpad document, I see additional references to the IU KB.  I'd definitely like to learn more about this possibility for a community based KB.

The next conference call on this topic will be next week -- Wednesday, January 19.  Tomorrow, I'll send out more details with time, phone number, etc.

Thanks, all!

Sincerely,

Alan Regan, MFA
Manager, Technology and Learning
Information Technology
Pepperdine University
(310) 506-6756


-----Original Message-----
From: John Bush [mailto:john.bush at rsmart.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2011 9:38 AM
To: Seth Theriault
Cc: Regan, Alan; sakai-user at collab.sakaiproject.org
Subject: Re: [Using Sakai] Using Sakai - Scheduling the January Call for Sakai Documentation Redesign project

It might be a little late in the cycle to consider this for 2.8, but
maybe for the future.  One of the things we do to separate the
schedule of our release with the help content is to unhinge the help
from the source and refer to the help externally.  I think this was a
feature IU originally developed.  You can set a help location like
this:

help.location=http://myhelp.server.com/rsmart-help-content

This allows us to push out help to all our clients without needing to
rebuild/deploy each sakai instance.  It just needs a simple manifest
xml file and the raw html content.  We use a word2doc converter to
create all the html from a doc and then have a scripts that generates
the manifest file.  There is a little manual editing to adjust the
categorization and link the tool ids, but its pretty easy.

There might be some benefit in the foundation following a similar
model.  There's no reason why the help can't be dynamic as well.  You
could create a community based knowledge base into the help and share
it across all instances for example, even have it version aware like
this:

help.location=http://myhelp-sakai.server.com/help-content?version=280
help.location=http://myhelp.sakai.com/help-content?version=281

Something to consider...

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 10:10 AM, Seth Theriault <slt at columbia.edu> wrote:
> Regan, Alan wrote:
>
>> Per Sean Keesler's notes, here is a proposed agenda:
>>
>> * Identify project lead to help with Sakai 2.8 coordination
>>
>> * Identify sections of the out of the box (OOTB) docs to target
>>   for redesign in 2.8
>
> For these two items, time is of the essence. As I mentioned on
> the call in December, any new or improved OOTB Help content for
> 2.8 probably needs to be done and committed by mid-to-late
> January to make the release.
>
> The release of Sakai 2.8 is scheduled for 1 March 2010:
>
> https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/REL/Sakai+2.8+Release+Schedule
>
> If you wait until the week of 17 January to act on these items,
> it will probably be too late for anything to get into 2.8.
>
> Seth
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--
John Bush
602-490-0470