Charles Severance

Hi everyone - how the time has flown in the past two months. Sakai
2.1 moving quickly. Here is the rough schedule for 2.1.

Integration Week

Monday 10/24 Integration Week Begins in Ann Arbor - If you want to
drop by, let me know - we have a fun time, hang out fix bugs and do
integration. We provide unlimited espresso drinks and free lunches.
If you are a senior developer in Sakai and want to come and help in
the integration this week - let me know. Folks from UM, IU, OSP, and
Northwestern will be on hand. I will send out quick status summary
each day during iWeek.

First Alpha

Thursday 10/27 First Alpha Cut and handed to QA

Expect at least a release per week. We will tag the release and send
a note out to the dev list immediately. Alpha releases will generally
just be a tag - as we get close to the release we will switch to
actually making release bundles.

JIRA will be very important. During the QA process and the
maintenance branch activity, JIRA will drive our priorities. So
having accurate information in JIRA is critical.

Release

Release is First week of December.

I and others will be sending out updates at least once per week
updating on status.

Because time is tight, If you are expecting to be running this 2.1
release in production in January, we want to make sure to keep you all
in the loop. If you have not already done so, make sure that you have
talked to Anthony Whyte (arwhyte@umich.edu) and got him the details of
your production deployment.

People planning on deploying 2.1 should take the first alpha and
immediately begin to work to test your provider and other local
configurations for Sakai. A few small bits have changed but all in
all there are few changes - so you should be able to do integration
testing on the first alpha release. This way if there are problems
(or even questions or code changes you need to do) you can start
immediately - not wait until December. The providers, css, etc are
all quite stable at this point - so don't wait to begin kicking the
tires - if you have a problem - that is part of the QA process - we
can fix things quite naturally during QA.

2.1 Contents

Samigo - bug fixes, section aware, and improvements - Stanford
Section Tool - Berkeley
Gradebook - Section aware and other improvements - Berkeley/MIT
Framework - Section aware and performance improvements - All
Resources Tool - Significantly improved - set up for OSP integration -
Michigan/Indiana
Roster Tool - Integrated with Profile - Indiana

Provisional Tools/Features:

TwinPeaks repository integration from OKI and Indiana
Rwiki from Cambridge
SakaiScript from Northwestern
SU Tool from Texas State
CourseManagement API
IMS Tool Interoperability (TI) Launcher - Michigan

Provisional features will be part of the release but not part of the
out of box experience. They will require some configuration changes
to enable or use. The idea of provisional tools is to allow new
features to get used on a trial basis by some sites to determine
whether they are suitable for some future release.

A lot of work has gone into this release. Initial indications are
that this will be a great release - but there is a lot of hard work in
running the QA and fixing any problems with the release. If you want
to volunteer to help in the QA effort please contact Carol Dippel
dippel@ix.netcom.com

Oct. 26 Update

Cruising towards a release of the first rev of 2.1 Friday morning.
Lots of stuff has come together nicely in the past two days.

Samigo is in good shape still. Stanford is full-steam ahead.

Ray is working on adding the features to Gradebook needed for this
release.

Rwiki is in the main SVN - Congrats to Ian and team - come play on
nightly2 after the next build

Su Tool is in the main SVN - Congrats to Zach and team - It also is
on nightly2 after the next build

TwinPeaks is going well but we are a little behind. The DR OSID
implementation is in and passing unit tests nicely. We still need to
put the servlet that does the searching together and integrate it
into HTMLarea. The plan is to not enable TP out of the box - but
make it a simple matter to un-comment something to enable TP. So you
won't see TP on nightly.

Site Groups are there in Site Info - You can make groups, populate
them and send announcements to different combinations of groups.
Some GUI details are still needing to be cleaned up but the
functionality is there. Stop by nightly2 to kick the tires.

SakaiScript (web services) is updated and ready to use/test from
head. Cleaned up SakaiLogin.jws and added SakaiPortalLogin.jws

The new Resources Tool and new Resource Picker should be there. Take
a look. It has a neat feature where you can pick something from any
site you can read including your My WorkSpace to use as an attachment.

Indiana is working on getting their local tools ready to plug into
head - the AuthzGroup refactor caught those tools - but there only a
few changes and the changes are pretty basic - it should not take too
long.

Josh and Glenn are still working through a few issues with SiteGroups/
AUTHZ for the Sections tool. Should be in hand in a day.

Aaron from Virginia Tech is sacrificing himself and testing to see
what it takes to bring forward his providers and keeping notes as he
goes. This is cool and will help everyone get a head start. (P.S.
for those of you with Course providers, the tab parsing is now
delegated back to the provider - remember the Yale meeting ?? )

So far, so good - and it is only Tuesday. Here is my "list of stuff
to think about" for the rest of the week.

Seth's Kerberos stuff, TwinPeaks Servlet and HTMLArea Integration,
Indiana-only tools catching up to head, mail fixes, MySql Fixes from
Rutgers, Access and DAV improvements from Rutgers (the Rutgers DAV
bug fixes are already there), the JSR-168 Portlet (provisional only),
WSRP last minute tweaks (sorry Vishal - have not yet caught up today)..