Release Announcements - Orodan/Hilary GitHub Wiki

OAE Kingfisher (Version 12 - 28 September 2015)

The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project is proud to announce a milestone release of the Apereo Open Academic Environment; OAE Kingfisher or OAE 12.

OAE Kingfisher is one of the most significant releases of the Open Academic Environment software and includes many new features geared towards making OAE a truly global system that is capable of connecting the whole of academia. Next to these features, OAE Kingfisher also includes significant improvements to the search experience, the ability to delete and archive users and many usability improvements and bug fixes.

Changelog

Invitations

The most important new feature in the Kingfisher release is the ability for users to invite anyone in the world to a group, content item or discussion using an email address. While it used to be a requirement for a person to have an account before they could be invited into collaborations, the invitation feature now opens the door to including anyone you want to work with and truly pushed towards the OAE vision of creating a connected and global network for academic collaboration.

When invited users can be matched to an existing tenancy and institution, they will be invited into that tenancy and will be able to collaborate from their institutional account. When invited users can’t be matched to an existing tenancy, they will be invited into a “Guest” tenancy.

Multi-tenancy improvements

Apereo OAE now offers support for 1,000s of tenancies and institutions on a single installation, allowing for collaboration between people at a large number of institutions all around the world. In order to support this, OAE Kingfisher includes a wide range of general performance improvements as well as various improvements to the administration interface.

Email verification

Users signing up for a new account or users coming in through an authentication source that does not provide a verified email address are now required to verify their email address before they are able to use the system. This will ensure a much higher level of trust in OAE accounts and the people you collaborate with and reduces potential abuse.

Similarly, existing users changing their email address will also need to go through the email verification workflow before their changes take effect.

Search

Up until OAE version 11, searching through the OAE would return results that encompass everything you're allowed to see, including results from the institution you're a member of and public results. While being able to search and discover across the entire network is one of the unique features of the OAE software, it sometimes caused results from the collaborations you're directly involved in to be buried.

Therefore, OAE Kingfisher offers a significantly enhanced search experience in which it is possible to toggle between results from only the groups, content items and discussions you're involved in, results from your institution or results from the entire network. This should make it much easier to find the specific items you're looking for, while still making it possible to cast a wider net and discover interesting groups, people, content items and discussions throughout the network.

Navigation improvements

OAE Kingfisher introduces a number of navigation improvements, which should significantly enhance the overall experience. For example, a better top navigation has been put in place for mobile devices and users now automatically land on their personal activity feed when going to the system, resulting in less clicks overall and more direct access to the information they're looking for.

Delete users

OAE Kingfisher makes it possible for tenant administrators to delete users, allowing for inactive or unused user accounts to be removed from the system. Deleted users are not removed from the system entirely though, but are archived instead and all of their groups, content items and discussions are retained. Therefore, deleted user accounts can be re-activated by an administrator at any point in time.

Try it out

OAE Kingfisher 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 12.0.0 and can be downloaded from the following repositories:

Back-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/tree/12.0.0
Front-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/tree/12.0.0

Documentation on how to install the system can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/blob/12.0.0/README.md.

Instruction on how to upgrade an OAE installation from version 11 to version 12 can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/wiki/OAE-Upgrade-Guide.

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

OAE Jack Snipe (Version 11 - 12 May 2015)

The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project team is extremely pleased to announce the eleventh major release of the Apereo Open Academic Environment; OAE Jack Snipe or OAE 11.

OAE Jack Snipe brings a wide range of new features and capabilities, including group profile pages, the ability to delete and archive groups, an editor role for collaborative documents and increased configuration support for landing pages and the footer. Next to that, OAE Jack Snipe also includes an extraordinary number of usability gains, accessibility improvements and bug fixes.

Changelog

Group Profiles

OAE Jack Snipe brings group profile pages, allowing for groups to be better contextualised and presented to non-members. A group profile page contains a description of the group, ensuring that the subject and goal of the group is clear to the visitor, a public activity feed, showcasing the recent activity that has taken place in the group, and a list of featured members, providing an idea of the people involved in the group.

Group profiles are anticipated to be especially useful when browsing and discovering public or joinable groups, but will also provide convenient additional context when visiting groups you're already a member of.

Delete group

OAE Jack Snipe makes it possible for group managers to delete groups, allowing for inactive or unused groups to be removed from membership libraries. Deleted groups are not removed from the system entirely though, but are archived instead. Therefore, deleted groups can be re-activated by an administrator at any point in time.

Editor role

Recent usage feedback has indicated a need for allowing people to edit a collaborative document without being able to perform other administrative tasks such as deleting the document. Examples include a collaborative writing course where students needed to be able to contribute to a collaborative document without being able to delete it.

Therefore, OAE Jack Snipe introduces an editor role for collaborative documents. Users and groups with the editor role will be able to edit the collaborative document without being able to manage it (delete, manage access, etc.)

List items

Up until Apereo OAE 10, the display of list item titles was limited to a single line of text. As space was limited, this often meant that the title was cut off too quickly, making it difficult to identify an item.

OAE Jack Snipe ensures that all list items (libraries, search, etc.) will display a much larger part of the item's title (up to 2 full lines), making it a lot easier to identify the item you're looking for. We are convinced that this relatively small usability improvement will make a world of difference when using the system.

Mobile login

On mobile devices, there will no longer be a need to sign in every time a user visits their tenant. A session will now be remembered for up to 30 days, ensuring that OAE and its activity feed can be accessed quickly and easily.

REST API improvements

As easy-to-use and well documented REST APIs have always been a critical part of the OAE architecture, OAE Jack Snipe introduces a range of REST API enhancements.

Next to various REST API usability improvements, OAE Jack Snipe introduces a cross-origin resource sharing (CORS), making it easier for external applications to integrate with the OAE REST APIs.

The Swagger REST API documentation framework has also been upgraded to the latest version, adding some nifty additional features to the REST API documentation pages.

Google Authentication

The Google Authentication integration that ships with Apereo OAE has been upgraded to work with the latest version of the Google Authentication API. Next to that, it is now also possible to configure multiple Google Apps authentication domains per tenant.

Landing page configuration

Apereo OAE tenant landing pages can be fully customised, allowing for an institution to present and contextualise their tenancy with great flexibility. OAE Jack Snipe introduces a number of additional tenant landing page configuration and customisation options, providing even greater control over their look and feel.

Footer configuration

The page footer can now be fully configured and customised on a per installation basis. Amongst other things, this will allow Apereo OAE hosting providers to name the installation, link to a website for the installation and link back to the website for the hosting provider.

Try it out

OAE Jack Snipe can be tried out 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 11.0.0 and can be downloaded from the following repositories:

Back-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/tree/11.0.0
Front-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/tree/11.0.0

Documentation on how to install the system can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/blob/11.0.0/README.md.

Instruction on how to upgrade an OAE installation from version 10 to version 11 can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/wiki/OAE-Upgrade-Guide.

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

OAE Ibis (Version 10 - 14 January 2015)

The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project team is excited to announce the tenth major release of the Apereo Open Academic Environment; OAE Ibis or OAE 10.

OAE Ibis brings the ability for institutions to completely customise the content and look of their tenant landing page. OAE Ibis also implements a detailed user tracking framework and brings the long-awaited full-text indexing and searching feature. Next to that, OAE Ibis also ships a range of other search improvements and a large number of accessibility improvements.

Changelog

Customisable tenant landing pages

OAE Ibis makes it possible for institutions to completely customise their tenant landing page, allowing them to appropriately contextualise their tenancy, present themselves and explain the main purpose of the tenancy.

Tenant administrators are able to add any number of text, video and image blocks to the landing page, set their styling and determine their width on different devices, allowing for a fully responsive landing page to be configured. All configured text can also be fully internationalised.

We are already looking forward to seeing what the institutions will come up! We'll definitely publish a list of the best ones in an upcoming blog post.

User tracking

OAE Ibis introduces a detailed user tracking framework to provide a complete overview of how OAE is being used. Using an integration with a 3rd party service called Mixpanel, OAE can now keep track of almost all usage-related information: how many users have signed in, how many content items have been created and what is their distribution in visibility, how many comments were added, how many public groups are there and how does this evolve over time, etc.

This provides a solid basis for making product decisions based on real usage data and opens the door to performing A-B testing on new features. In a future release, we will also be providing this information to tenant administrators to give them a complete overview of how and how actively their tenancy is being used.

Full-text indexing

Following numerous rounds of performance testing, OAE Ibis brings the long-awaited arrival of full-text indexing and searching. The full content of all uploaded PDF, Office and text files will now be indexed and included in searches, making it a lot easier to find the content you're looking for or discover interesting new content.

Accessibility improvements

As the first step in the process of trying to obtain a WCAG 2.0 accessibility certification for OAE, a full external accessibility review of the OAE software has been undertaken by WebAIM. They delivered a review document containing a list of recommended accessibility improvements, which is something we'll be publishing and discussing in an upcoming blog post.

OAE Ibis includes accessibility improvements for the most critical issues that were identified in the review, with more accessibility improvements planned for upcoming releases.

Search improvements

Next to providing full-text searching, OAE Ibis also introduces a number of additional search improvements.

When searching for people, there will now be a slight bias towards people from your own institution. This should make it easier to find the people you're looking for, and is the first step towards making further improvements in this area.

Searches in content and discussion libraries will now also include the text of the comments and discussions posts, making it easier to find the content item or discussion you're looking for.

Try it out

OAE Ibis can be tried out 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 10.0.0 and can be downloaded from the following repositories:

Back-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/tree/10.0.0
Front-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/tree/10.0.0

Documentation on how to install the system can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/blob/10.0.0/README.md.

Instruction on how to upgrade an OAE installation from version 9 to version 10 can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/wiki/OAE-Upgrade-Guide.

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

OAE Heron (Version 9 - 24 September 2014)

The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project team is extremely proud to announce the next major release of the Apereo Open Academic Environment; OAE Heron or OAE 9.

OAE Heron is a landmark release that introduces the long awaited folders functionality, allowing for sets of content items to be collected, organised, shared and curated. OAE Heron also provides full support for Shibboleth access management federations and brings improvements to activities, (email) notifications and the REST API documentation. Next to that, OAE Heron also ships with a wide range of overall usability improvements.

Changelog

Folders

Using the personal and group libraries, Apereo OAE has always allowed collaboration to grow organically, reflecting how most of our collaborations work in real life. Individual content items could be shared with people and groups, making those items available in their respective libraries. This has always tested extremely well in usability testing, and not requiring the organisation of items upfront has been considered to reduce the obstacles to collaboration.

However, sustained usage and usability testing have also highlighted a number of challenges with this approach. First of all, it was difficult to group items that logically belong together (e.g. a set of field trip pictures) and share and interact with them as a single unit. Next to that, heavy use of the system was showing that libraries could become quite hard to manage over time and were clearly lacking some form of organisation.

Therefore, OAE introduces the long-awaited folders functionality, a feature we've been working on for an extended period of time and has gone through many rounds of usability testing. OAE Folders allow for a set of content items to be grouped into a folder. This folder can be shared with other people and groups and has its own permissions and metadata. A folder also has its own thumbnail picture based on the items inside of the folder and folders will generate helpful activities, notifications and emails.

OAE folders also stay true to the OAE philosophy, and therefore content items are never bound to a folder. This means that the items in a folder can still be used as an independent item and can be shared, discussed, etc. individually. This also means that a content item can belong to multiple folders at the same time, opening the door for re-mixing content items and content curation, allowing new interesting folders to be created from existing folders and content items.

Whilst maintaining the ability to grow collaboration organically, OAE Folders allow for a better and more logical organisation of content items and open the door to many interesting content re-use scenarios.

Shibboleth federations

Many countries around the world now expose their own Shibboleth access management federation. This provides an organised and managed way in which an application can be offered to many institutions at the same time, directly integrating with the institutional Single Sign On systems.

OAE Heron makes it possible for an OAE installation to become a recognised Service Provider for one or more of these federations. This dramatically simplifies the tenant creation process for an institution that's a member of one of these access management federations, making it possible to set up an OAE tenant with full Shibboleth SSO integration in a matter of minutes.

Email improvements

OAE Heron introduces significant email notification improvements for those users that have their email preference set to Immediate. OAE was already capable of aggregating a series of actions that happened in quick succession into a single email. OAE Heron makes this possible over a longer period of time, and will hold off sending an email until a series of events that would otherwise generate multiple email notifications has finished. This dramatically cuts down the number of emails that are sent out by OAE and provides a more intelligent email update to users.

The display of email notifications on mobile devices has also been improved significantly, making the content of the email much easier to read.

Activity improvements

OAE Heron offers more descriptive activity summaries, especially in the area of content creation. These will for example provide a much better overview of the context in which an activity happened.

Next to that, OAE Heron will also ensure that the indicator for the number of unread notifications a user has is always completely accurate.

REST API documentation

OAE Heron continues to build on the REST API documentation that was introduced in OAE Griffin. It makes all possible responses for each of the REST endpoints available through the documentation UI and further improves the quality of the available documentation.

Try it out

OAE Heron can be tried out 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 9.0.0 and can be downloaded from the following repositories:

Back-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/tree/9.0.0
Front-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/tree/9.0.0

Documentation on how to install the system can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/blob/9.0.0/README.md.

Instruction on how to upgrade an OAE installation from version 8 to version 9 can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/wiki/OAE-Upgrade-Guide.

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

OAE Griffin (Version 8 - 26 August 2014)

The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project team is excited to announce the next major release of the Apereo Open Academic Environment; OAE Griffin or OAE 8.

OAE Griffin brings a complete overhaul of the collaborative document experience, metadata widgets, full interactive REST API documentation and improved Office document previews. Next to that, OAE Griffin also introduces a wide range of incremental usability improvements, technical advances and bug fixes.

Changelog

Collaborative documents

The collaborative document experience in OAE Griffin has been completely overhauled. Whilst OAE's collaborative note taking capabilities have consistently been identified as very useful during usability testing, the actual Etherpad editor user experience has always tested poorly and never felt like an inherent part of the OAE platform.

Therefore, OAE Griffin introduces a fully skinned and customised collaborative document editor. The Etherpad editor has been skinned to make it fit seamlessly into the overall OAE interface and a number of under-utilised features have been removed. The editor and toolbar now also behave a lot better on mobile devices. All of this creates a much cleaner, more integrated and easier to use collaborative document experience.

At the same time, the activities and notifications generated by collaborative documents have also been fine-tuned. OAE Griffin now detects which people have made a change and will generate accurate activities, providing a much better idea of what's been happening inside of a document.

Metadata widgets

It is now possible to see the metadata for all content items, discussions and groups. This includes the full title of the item, the description, who created it and when it was created. For content items and discussions, it is also possible to see the full list of managers and people and groups it's shared with. All of this will provide a lot more context to an item, for example when discovering an interesting content item or when wondering who's involved in a discussion.

At the same time, the long-awaited download button has been provided for all content items, ensuring that the original file can easily be downloaded.

REST API Documentation

OAE Griffin introduces a REST API documentation framework and all of the OAE REST APIs have been fully documented. This work is based on a REST API documentation specification called Swagger, and offers a nice interactive UI where the documentation can be viewed and all of the REST endpoints can be tried.

This documentation is available on every OAE tenant and sits alongside the internal API documentation. All of this should provide sufficient information and documentation for widget development and integration with OAE.

Office documents

The OAE preview processor has been upgraded from LibreOffice 3.5 to LibreOffice 4.3. This brings tremendous improvements to the content previews that are generated for Office files (Word, Excel and PowerPoint). Especially the display of shapes, pictures and tables has been much improved, whilst some additional font support has been added as well.

Email improvements

The email notifications have been tweaked to ensure that emails sent out by OAE are as relevant as possible. At the same time, a number of visual improvements have been made to those emails to ensure that they look good on all devices.

Embedding improvements

Browsers have started introducing a set of new new cross-protocol embedding restrictions, which were causing some embedded links to not show correctly in the content profile. Therefore, OAE Griffin puts a number of measures in place that improve link embedding is and provide a fallback when a link can not be embedded.

CAS Authentication

It is now possible to pick up and use SAML attributes released by a CAS authentication server. This allows for a user's profile metadata to be available immediately after signing into OAE for the first time, without having to pre-provision the account.

Icons

The icons used in OAE Griffin have been upgraded from FontAwesome 3 to FontAwesome 4.3, allowing for a wider variety of icons to be used in widget development.

Apache Cassandra

OAE Griffin has been upgraded from Apache Cassandra 1.2.15 to Apache Cassandra 2.0.8, bringing a range of performance improvements, as well as the possibility of setting up simple database transactions.

Try it out

OAE Griffin can be tried out 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 8.0.0 and can be downloaded from the following repositories:

Back-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/tree/8.0.0
Front-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/tree/8.0.0

Documentation on how to install the system can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/blob/8.0.0/README.md.

Instruction on how to upgrade an OAE installation from version 7 to version 8 can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/wiki/OAE-Upgrade-Guide.

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

OAE Falcon (Version 7 - 23 June 2014)

The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project team is extremely proud to announce the next major release of the Apereo Open Academic Environment; OAE Falcon, or OAE 7.

OAE Falcon comes with a complete overhaul of the OAE email notification experience, as well as a more complete set of utilities for user and system management.

Changelog

Email Preferences

A frequent request from OAE users is to provide greater control over how often they receive email. OAE Falcon provides the ability for users to specify how often they wish to receive email:

  • Immediately - When selected, users will receive an e-mail immediately after an important activity has taken place. When multiple important activities happen in quick succession, they are aggregated into a single e-mail
  • Daily - When selected, users will receive an e-mail once per day containing all the notifications the user received in the last 24 hours
  • Weekly - When selected, users will receive an e-mail once per week containing all the notifications the user received in the last 7 days

Regardless of the email preference, users can still access their notifications from the OAE user interface in real-time as they occur.

Email Templates

The e-mail templates have been completely overhauled to provide a gorgeous design inside your inbox. When recent notifications are sent by e-mail, the design will be more consistent with what is seen in the regular OAE user interface as well as take on the branding configuration of your institution.

In addition to being branded to an institution, the e-mail templates are now completely translated using the standard Crowdin translation approach.

All of this greatly simplifies the maintenance of e-mail templates in Apereo OAE.

User Management

OAE Falcon provides the ability for global and tenant administrators to perform a variety of maintenance tasks to help support their users, including:

  • "Become" a user, allowing an administrator to browse the tenant on behalf of the user
  • Reset user account passwords
  • Update user profile information and visibility
  • Create new user accounts
  • Search all user accounts in the tenant

System Maintenance

In addition to an enhanced set of tools for managing users, OAE Falcon improves administration for the Global Administrator by providing tools to reindex items in the search index and reprocess content previews based on content and revision filters.

Automated Testing

Support for UI unit tests based on the web browser emulator "PhantomJS" has been added to the automated build process, starting with over 600 unit tests and more to come. These are being added to the existing automated test suite of over 1000 back-end API unit tests, providing even more stability to the release process.

Try it out

OAE Falcon 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 numbers 7.0.0 and can be downloaded from the following repositories:

Back-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/tree/7.0.0
Front-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/tree/7.0.0

Documentation on how to install the system can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/blob/7.0.0/README.md.

Instruction on how to upgrade an OAE installation from version 6.0 to version 7.0 can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/wiki/OAE-Upgrade-Guide.

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

OAE Emperor Penguin (Version 6 - 9 April 2014)

The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project team is extremely proud to announce the next major release of the Apereo Open Academic Environment; OAE Emperor Penguin or OAE 6.

OAE Emperor Penguin brings a fully responsive UI, ensuring that OAE works seamlessly on mobile and tablet devices. OAE Emperor Penguin also adds a range of usability improvements and a full Brazilian Portuguese translation.

Changelog

Responsive UI

An increasing number of people expect to be able to use applications on mobile and tablet devices, and Apereo OAE is not an exception. Usage statistics already show that many of our users are accessing OAE through these devices.

Apereo OAE uses Twitter Bootstrap as its CSS framework. When they released their latest version, introducing support for responsive applications, it seemed like an appropriate time to make the OAE UI fully responsive. Despite using this responsive CSS framework and the fact that OAE has been designed tablet first, making the UI fully responsive has been a massive undertaking that has ended up touching most of the application.

However, we are extremely pleased with the end result and OAE now works well on a wide range of mobile and tablet devices. Whilst all OAE functionality works seamlessly on these devices, it is especially pleasant to keep track of your user and group activity feeds.

Brazilian Portuguese translation

A complete Brazilian Portuguese translation is now available for the OAE UI. Many thanks to César Goudouris for providing this translation!

Try it out

OAE Emperor Penguin 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 numbers 6.0.0 and can be downloaded from the following repositories:

Back-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/tree/6.0.0
Front-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/tree/6.0.0

Documentation on how to install the system can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/blob/6.0.0/README.md.

Instruction on how to upgrade an OAE installation from version 5.0 to version 6.0 can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/wiki/OAE-Upgrade-Guide.

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

OAE Desert Sparrow (Version 5 - 17 March 2014)

The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project team is pleased to announce the fifth major release of the Apereo Open Academic Environment; OAE Desert Sparrow or OAE 5.

OAE Desert Sparrow is a mostly technical release, upgrading OAE from CQL2 to CQL3. Next to that, OAE Desert Sparrow also adds full-text search of content comments and discussion posts.

Changelog

CQL3 Upgrade

Apereo OAE has been upgraded from CQL2 to CQL3. CQL2 has been deprecated in Cassandra 1.2 and will be removed in the next major Cassandra release. While CQL2 provides an SQL-like abstraction to Thrift in Cassandra, CQL3 goes a step further to provide a more natural row-column model. A detailed overview of the differences between CQL2 and CQL3 can be found on the Datastax website.

Whilst this upgrade is not a user-facing improvement, it still warrants a new major release because of the amount of underlying changes involved and the need to migrate any existing data. However, the migration can happen without requiring any downtime.

Message searching

When searching for content items, the full text of all comments on those content items will now be included for searches. Similarly, the full text of all discussion posts will be considered when searching for discussions. This includes both global searches and searches within content and discussion libraries and should make it even more likely that relevant results will be returned.

Try it out

OAE Desert Sparrow 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 numbers 5.0.0 and can be downloaded from the following repositories:

Back-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/tree/5.0.0
Front-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/tree/5.0.0

Documentation on how to install the system can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/blob/5.0.0/README.md.

Instruction on how to upgrade an OAE installation from version 4.4 to version 5.0 can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/wiki/OAE-Upgrade-Guide.

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

OAE Cardinal (Version 4 - January/February 2014)

The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project team is pleased to announce the fourth major release of the Apereo Open Academic Environment; OAE Cardinal or OAE 4. In fact, the team has been so busy that 9 different releases have already taken place under the Cardinal umbrella, which means that the latest version is 4.3.0.

OAE Cardinal's main new feature is push notifications, providing real-time UI updates for activity relevant to the user or activity happening in the context the user is currently looking at. Next to that, OAE Cardinal also adds OAuth support for the REST APIs, activity feed and caching improvements, new UI translations and much more.

Changelog

Push notifications

Prior to OAE Cardinal, it was necessary to refresh the page to see any changes that have happened since the page was loaded, which caused people to not immediately notice changes or be able to react to new activity. User testing and user feedback also showed that people almost expected immediate updates to be part of a collaborative system like OAE.

The introduction of push notifications addresses this in a very seamless way, providing real-time UI updates for activity relevant to the user or activity happening in the context the user is currently looking at. Some examples of push notifications in action can be seen in our Push Notifications screencast.

Push notifications use websockets under the hood to push updates to the browser, which is a technological foundation that will be useful for many other features to come. Performance testing these push notifications turned out to be quite a challenge because of the websocket readiness of performance testing tools, but we're pleased to say that we've been able to contribute significantly to the websocket support of Tsung, our performance testing tool of choice.

OAuth

It is now possible to authenticate with the OAE APIs via OAuth 2's "Client Credentials Grant". This new authentication mechanism provides much easier programmatical access to the APIs without sacrificing security. After creating an OAuth Client, it can be used to interact with all the OAE APIs on behalf of the client's owner.

UI translations

OAE Cardinal now has complete translations for the following new languages:

  • Swedish (thanks to Måns Ramberg from Research Research)
  • Hindi (thanks to Udaya Ghattamaneni from Marist College)

Activity feed improvements

A number of activity feed improvements have been added to the OAE Cardinal release. Thanks to push notifications, activity feeds will now immediately reflect any actions taken by the current user. For example, files uploaded will be shown in the activity feed straight away, without having to refresh the page, dramatically improving the navigational experience.

Improvements have also been made to the number of activities that show in your activity feed from people you follow. Any private items that the current user is not involved in, will no longer be surfaced. Even though those items were correctly not accessible when clicking through, it removes the potential of exposing something and reduces the amount of activity updates received.

Email throttling

A number of precautions have been put in place to avoid people receiving too many email notifications for actions taking place in the system. This is only the first step in a number of improvements that will rationalise the OAE email notification behaviour further down the line, including the introduction of email notification preferences and aggregation.

Caching improvements

Improvements to the production build script have been made, ensuring that subsequent builds will not conflict with each other in terms of files cached in the browser. This will make sure that all files are correctly cached, but still correctly refreshed when necessary.

Try it out

OAE Cardinal 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 numbers 4.0.0, 4.1.0, 4.1.1, 4.1.2, 4.1.3, 4.2.0, 4.2.1, 4.2.2 and 4.3.0. The latest version can be downloaded from the following repositories:

Back-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/tree/4.3.0
Front-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/tree/4.3.0

Documentation on how to install the system can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/blob/4.3.0/README.md.

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

OAE Blue Jay (3.0 - 5 December 2013)

The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project team is pleased to announce the third major release of the Apereo Open Academic Environment; OAE Blue Jay or OAE 3.0.

OAE Blue Jay introduces a new and improved Document Previewer that allows rich documents such as PDFs, Microsoft Word and Excel files to be displayed and embedded directly within OAE without requiring a download. OAE Blue Jay also supports migrating all existing documents to this enhanced version.

In addition to this, OAE Blue Jay also brings a wide range of usability improvements based on usability testing.

Document Previewer

High-fidelity previews

Prior to OAE Blue Jay, the Document Previewer converted the pages inside of a rich document to images. While it produced picture-perfect previews, it had some drawbacks:

  • Generating image-based previews takes significantly longer
  • Image-based previews are large in file-size, degrading the document browsing experience
  • Image-based previews degrade in quality as zoom level increases
  • Image-based previews are inaccessible to screen readers

In the OAE Blue Jay release, we have replaced the image-based processor with the pdf2htmlEX Open Source project, generating high-fidelity HTML for each of the pages. This enhances previews in the following ways:

  • Generating previews on large documents is orders of magnitude faster
  • Documents that are mostly text are significantly smaller in file-size
  • Zooming of text can be achieved natively in the browser without loss of preview quality
  • Accessibility improvements as the text is available in the HTML

Easy to use viewer

These new HTML-based previews are displayed in OAE inside of our new simplified Document Previewer. This allows you to easily flip through pages, request a specific page or zoom in and out of pages.

On top of that, this new Document Previewer is also fully internationalizable and skinnable.

Full screen reading

It is now possible to enjoy reading documents without distraction by using the full-screen mode feature available in the new Document Previewer.

Solid foundation

This new Document Previewer is only a first step. It opens up the door to indexing and searching the full text of these documents, as well as allowing for annotations to be made inside of documents.

Try it out

OAE Blue Jay 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 3.0.0 and can be downloaded from the following repositories:

Back-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/tree/3.0.0
Front-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/tree/3.0.0

Documentation on how to install the system can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/blob/3.0.0/README.md.

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

OAE Alpine Swift (2.0 - 28 October 2013)

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 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 for all tenants through the global 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 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 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 acccessibility improvements (e.g. refocussing 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.

OAE Phoenix 1.2 (23 August 2013)

The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project team is pleased to announce the second minor release of the OAE Phoenix release; OAE Phoenix 1.2.

OAE Phoenix 1.2 upgrades the Hilary back-end to Node.js 0.10 and brings some user-facing improvements like Administration UI improvements, CAS authentication mappings and a number of bug fixes. In the background, ongoing work on performance testing, automated UI testing and automated cluster deployment has been going on, which is now nearing completion.

Try it out

The source code has been tagged with version number 0.2.2 and can be downloaded from the following repositories:

Back-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/tree/0.2.2
Front-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/tree/0.2.2

Documentation on how to install the system can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/blob/0.2.2/README.md.

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

Changelog

CAS Authentication mappings

It is now possible to map the OAE display name, e-mail, locale and timezone against CAS attributes released by a CAS authentication server. All of this can be configured on the fly through the Administration UI.

Administration UI improvements

  • A tenant's host name can now be modified on the fly through the administration UI.
  • A number of browser caching and back-end caching consistency bugs in the Tenants API have been fixed.
  • Added appropriate validation when creating new tenants
  • Refactored the Tenants API and increased test coverage

Mime type recognition

Improved mime type recognition has been put in place for uploaded files, ensuring that files uploaded from any browser will be appropriately recognized.

Accessibility improvements

All modal dialogs that have a type ahead component as the first focusable element will now receive appropriate focus when opening the modal. Next to that, a number of text alternatives for non-textual content have been added.

API improvements

All feeds that support paging now return a nextToken parameter that can be used to request the next page of results. This takes away the need to know which field to use for paging and should make it easier to use the REST APIs. A number of improvements have been made to the OAE UI APIs as well.

UI translations

The Spanish OAE translation is now back at 100% completeness, thanks to Samuel Gutiérrez Jiménez-Peña.

Node 0.10 upgrade

The Hilary back-end, as well as the activity and preview processor nodes, have been upgraded from Node.js 0.8 to 0.10 after extensive performance testing.

Production improvements

A bug that was preventing Etherpad documents from being published when using multiple Etherpad servers has been resolved.

OAE Phoenix 1.1 (01 August 2013)

The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project team is pleased to announce the first minor release of the OAE Phoenix release; OAE Phoenix 1.1.

OAE Phoenix 1.1 brings a number of new features, like LDAP authentication and new UI translations, a number of end-user improvements and improves OAE's ease of deployment and development. However, OAE Phoenix 1.1 is mostly a technical release, with lots of work going on in the background around performance testing and automated UI testing.

The first OAE production environment has also been set up and launched, and currently supports 3 institutions on a single instance. All tenants have been skinned, and most of the configuration has taken place, with 2 tenants using Shibboleth authentication and 1 tenant using CAS authentication:

This production environment has been updated to run the OAE Phoenix 1.1 release.

Try it out

The source code has been tagged with version number 0.2.1 and can be downloaded from the following repositories:

Back-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/tree/0.2.1
Front-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/tree/0.2.1

Documentation on how to install the system can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/blob/0.2.1/README.md.

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

Changelog

LDAP authentication

It is now possible to authenticate against an LDAP server and pull the user's pull basic profile information from LDAP. All of this can be configured and mapped on the fly through the Administration UI.

UI translations

  • A full Polish translation for OAE is now available (thanks to Katarzyna Napiórkowska)
  • A full Italian translation for OAE is now available (thanks to Renato Strazzulla and Toni Devís López)
  • A full Valencian translation for OAE is now available (thanks to Toni Devís López)
  • The French OAE translation is back at 100% completeness (thanks to Frederic Dooremont)
  • The German OAE translation is back at 100% completeness (thanks to Yildiray Ogurol)
  • OAE now has a more complete Dutch translation (thanks to Mark Breuker)

Discussion email notifications

Email notifications are now being sent for important discussion activities, like someone sharing a discussion with you, someone posting in a discussion you manage or you participated in, etc.

Activity for restored revisions

Restoring a content or document revision now generates an activity in the activity feed.

Automated testing improvements

The following QUnit tests have been added to the User Interface, although more work will be going into these during the next release:

  • Test that checks for code and styling issues in the JavaScript (using JSHint)
  • Test that checks for any translation keys in the various bundles that are no longer being used
  • Test that checks for any translation keys in the HTML and JavaScript that have not been translated
  • Test that checks for translation keys that have been duplicated inside a bundle or across widget bundles
  • Test that checks for hard-coded English strings that have not been internationalized
  • Test that checks that all CSS is in line with the project's style guide
  • Test that checks that all JavaScript is in line with the project's style guide
  • Test that checks for WCAG 2.0 Compliance - 1.1.1 Non-text Content / Text Alternatives issues
  • Test that checks the completeness of each available translation (limited to core bundles only)

Important work has gone into building out a set of automated functional UI tests. This is currently still in development and expected to be included in the next release.

The project's performance tests have also been significantly updated to reflect the latest state of the UI. This work is available at https://github.com/oaeproject/node-oae-tsung.

Ease of development

A number of issues that showed up when deploying and developing OAE on Windows have been addressed, making it more straightforward to get the system up and running on Windows.

Multiple improvements have also been made to the project's installation guide.

Performance improvements

The revisions feed for collaborative documents has been made more scalable, with the revision content being available on the individual revisions now instead of the global revision overview feed.

Production improvements

Improvements have been made to the re-index all operation, including the ability to re-index all discussions in the system.

Improvements have also been made to the re-generate previews operation, including supporting the re-generation of previews for individual content items.

It is now also possible for global and tenant admins to see the group members of all groups

OAE Phoenix (1.0 - 27 June 2013)

The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project team is pleased and excited to announce the first release of the Apereo Open Academic Environment; OAE Phoenix 1.0. This release consists of the first production ready release of Apereo OAE and focusses on providing support for various forms of academic collaboration.

Apereo OAE is designed as a multi-tenant platform that can be run at large scale, allowing for a single installation to support multiple institutions at the same time. OAE Phoenix 1.0 is a first and important step and attempts to provide a basic, but solid foundation that can be used as the basis for many more collaborative scenarios.

Try it out

The source code has been tagged with version number 0.2.0 and can be downloaded from the following repositories:

Back-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/tree/0.2.0
Front-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/tree/0.2.0

Documentation on how to install the system can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/blob/0.2.0/README.md.

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

Main features

Administration UI

  • Global administration panel allowing for tenant creation, management and configuration
  • Tenant administation panel allowing for tenant maintenance and configuration
  • Tenant skinning panel
  • Tenant permeability allowing for collaboration across institutions

Users and user management

  • Internal user creation
  • CAS integration, configurable through Admin panel
  • Shibboleth integration, configurable through Admin panel
  • Facebook, Twitter and Google authentication integration
  • Basic user profiles
  • User permissions
  • User preferences
  • Profile pictures

Groups and group management

  • Create group
  • Flexible and poweful group permissions
  • Group summary page
  • Manage group members
  • Various joinability options

Content and content management

  • File upload
  • Add links
  • Create collaborative documents (Etherpad integration)
  • Share files, links, collaborative documents with users and groups
  • Content and discussion profiles
  • Comment on and discuss content items
  • Flexible and powerful content permissions
  • Revisions and revision history
  • User and groups libraries

Discussions

  • Create discussions
  • Share discussions with users and groups
  • Discussion profile pages
  • Flexible and powerful discussion permissions

Activities and notifications

  • User and group activity feeds (activitystrea.ms specification)
  • Notifications for important activities
  • E-mail notifications

Search

  • Search users
  • Search groups
  • Search content
  • Search discussions