Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP

A while ago I posted a link to what I regarded as a great Power Point presentation (Shift Happens), but more importantly it was a really eye opening message.

In keeping with the Shift Happens theme, this has been updated and is now on You Tube as ‘Did you know 2.0?’

Always worth showing people just to get get them to really think about the future.

And a further update to this in the Did you know 4.0.

They have also started a Wiki page to discuss this further http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com/ - join the debate.

A big pat on the back for Alex Pearce and Richard Willis for organising the first every Microsoft Learning Gateway conference that took place on last week.  With such a focused topic as SharePoint in Education it was amazing too see that there were over 150 people packing out the two session rooms.

As promised I have uploaded my slide deck to Slideshare.  I have also included the option to download the original PowerPoint presentation as some of you may want to use this to discuss your own SharePoint deployments.

I do plan to do a screen cast of the presentation later in the year to provide some background for those that were unable to make it.     If you didn’t attend and you didn’t follow the torrent of tweets I did during the day you can see them here http://search.twitter.com/search?q=lgcuk

There has been a noticeable increase in the amount of people now blogging and tweeting about SharePoint in Education, or more accurately the Microsoft Learning Gateway platform.  Having posted a number of articles on the subject and having started the Education Special Interest group on SUGUK I thought it time I posted about some of this content.

The first an probably the most important change is the work Alex Pearce has done in rescuing what was really a failed attempt by Microsoft to promote MLG and re launch the http://www.learninggateway.net/ site and launch the Learning Gateway User Group

What is the Learning Gateway User Group?
This community site is here for you.  A place where you can share your personal experiences with the Learning Gateway.  You may just have Microsoft SharePoint as your Learning Gateway and you want to show off the work you have done, or you are a school and you want to talk about all the great ways students and teachers and working together, enriching the learners.

There are a number of bloggers who have moved their blogs to the site and we are starting to see some great posts on there.

To really kick start this drive Alex and Richard Willis (SalamanderSoft) have organised the first conference dedicated to the Microsoft Learning Gateway.

It is promising to be the best education SharePoint event this year for both technical and non-technical staff. Whether you are a Network Manager, VLE Co-ordinator or Head Teacher you will find this conference an opportunity to learn from industry recognised experts speaking about the technical best practice of the Learning Gateway and how to get your staff, pupils and parents engaged and secure. In addition you’ll be able to network with your peers and see how others are pushing forward their Gateway.

There are some great speakers lined up for the event including 5 MVPs in SharePoint and Exchange with the Keynote by Steve Beswick, Directory of Education at Microsoft.

SharePoint in Education

Mike Herrity, from Twynham School, has launched a fantastic blog where he is really sharing his experiences in working with SharePoint in Education.   Unlike myself who tends to work on the larger projects with local authorities and partners Mike is an Assistant Head Teacher so really does talk about what it’s like in the school.

http://sharepointineducation.com/

As I find more great resources I will add then to this post,  if you blog or tweet on the Microsoft Learning Gateway please add a comment below with a link.

I posted recently about the release of the LCDS to make it easier for people to create SCROM content.  I had a few comments and concerns but generally liked the look and feel. 

We now we have a place to discuss issues and generally help each other get the most from it.  

http://www.21apps.com/2008/05/microsoft-release-e-learning-editor.html

Oh and these forums are using the nice new ones so look pretty cool.

On the 1st July 2008 the SLK Course Manager package was uploaded to codeplex,  this was something that I had been waiting for as there are plans to incorporate functionality into a project I am currently working on.    Having installed and tested the solution I can say that I am totally under-whelmed,  this add-on was expected to fill the Gap left after the move from Class Server to SLK/MLG.

Please feel free to grab the download an try it out for yourselves, and post comments if you think I have this wrong.

http://www.codeplex.com/slk

A brief review of the Installation Guide highlighted some real concerns

1. You must be running the 1.3.1 (Alpha) release of SLK.   Yes you read that correctly – this will only work with Alpha code – who is going to deploy this to live??
2. This release is not guaranteed to work with future releases!  

For most these two statement alone should have started alarm bells ringing, and you are going to be pretty brave to let this code out to on you live installation.   Others have been waiting for ages for these additions so will press on.

Installation

The installation process is not too bad, you do need to pass in a parameter for the URL that actually has a web site – not a problem for most but if you have been a good SharePoint person and spilt out you schools into site collections you may not have a site at the root.

Central Admin feature activation is ok but I would have liked this to have been automated.  Database creation is a bit light – it works but could have been more helpful in pulling in default database details and suggesting a name,  the code for this is already in SLK so a bit lazy that!.

Only one database?  It appears that the solution relies on a DB connection setting in the registry,  meaning you can only have one database for course manager across the entire farm.   This may be ok for single school installations but what about the managed services or District (Local Authority in the UK) deployments.   Again why not use the same approach adopted by SLK to keep things consistent.

Its all a bit manual

Activation of the Course Manager on a site is all a bit too manual.  Considering you would need to do this as a site for each and every course.

The instructions do guide you through this feature activation and adding the 3 web parts so i’ll just look at these.

Course Manager Pages Web Part

Course Manager Pages Web Part,  just provides two links to the Plan and Assign page and the Monitor and Assess page (both stored in as forms in a document library).   I’m not sure of the design reasons for using a document library to hold pages and then not display the pages,  also why the link on the Quick Launch when you don’t use the library? 

The web part does not appear to have any logic,  i.e. if I log in as a student I still see both links?  why not hide them if you not an Instructor or Admin?

Plan and Assign Page and Web Part

As described above this page is stored in the forms library of the Course Manager Pages library.   But you have to manually add the Plan and Assign web part.  Come on please this is not hard to automate a page with some web parts on it!

In this page you have the ability to group assignments into Activities (in fact assignments as used in SLK are called activities in Course Manager) so you have Activity Groups which can have multiple Activities.   This is fairly useful in that it allows you to organise activities together.   The UI has made use of Ajax so no need for page postbacks – whilst I agree with this I find the actual UI to be very unfriendly..   Why do I click on a blue bar (that looks like a toolbar) in order to show a text box for data entry?

The file upload is good, you can upload a document without leaving the page, but it’s very limited.   Why can it only use one Library?   What if you have course material stored centrally do you have to copy it here?  it appears so with Course Manager.   Also if you navigate Up from the root of the document library you get completely redirected away from the page.

Assign / Unassign is an all or nothing activity,  no way to choose which students to assign the work to as in SLK, this is an all students regardless!   Not sure if that really reflects the real world where you will have mixed ability students in the same class.

I also noticed that any work you have assigned via SLK directly can only be viewed here – no ability to manage these or group into activities.

Monitor and Assess Page

As with the Plan and Assign page you have to manually add the web part which as you can see below is not really the GradeBook we were expecting.

Without any documented instructions this screen is just difficult to understand.   There are options to enter values on this page,  you can Save – but what? Return to learners – what am I returning?   Here we actually see the first real reference to a Course – pretty lame considering this is supposed to be a Course Manager. 

Clicking on the Activities (assignments) takes you to the normal SLK assignment management screens.

And that’s all that I could find?

At this point your probably looking at the documentation to see what was missed!  If you find anything please email as I’ve not found anything yet.  After installation you move straight to Uninstalling!  Wait perhaps that’s what is going to happen in reality once people see how little you get from the add on.

Disappointment in what has been provided has been raised and I am hoping that in the next few days I can report that I missed a whole area of functionality,  but having looked at the solution files and code (I know it’s not available,  but Reflector does a great job ) I can’t see anything.

Oh and I nearly forgot,  if your upgrading from a previous version there is a database Schema change (still testing the MLG version) as the new Observer role has been introduced.   Looking at the SLK documentation you are advised that in order to upgrade you need to delete you SLK database and create a new one.

Yes you read that correctly… DELETE YOUR DATABASE!!!

So all that work that you have done so far with SLK will. ummm be lost???   This for me is just ridiculous,  how about running something like SQL Compare on the DBs and a little bit of code to perform the upgrade,  I mean if we can upgrade SharePoint databases from V2 to V3 this should be a walk in the park.

Update 04 Jul 2008:   The UK Education Post on SLK Manager but show different screen shots

The UK Education team have posted an article on the SLK Course manager but you will see a big difference in the screen shots they have posted and the ones actually released to Codeplex.   Especially the Grade Book screen.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ukeducationpartnernews/archive/2008/07/02/slk-course-manager.aspx

Update 11 July 2008:  Reason for the Differences

Further update on why what we see is different and the plan to release an SDK and hopefully some timescales for the SLK 1.3.1 release.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ukeducationpartnernews/archive/2008/07/11/update-slk-course-manager.aspx

This post is off topic, in that it doesn’t related to SharePoint, however as I do a lot of work in Education this new WorldWide Telescope released by Microsoft Research is fantastic and worth a post.   I can remember going to the Planetarium in London way to many years ago and often spend a time on clear nights gazing at the stars (advantages of living in the country).

http://www.worldwidetelescope.org

What is WWT?

The WorldWide Telescope .. enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.

Enjoy

One of the main projects I have been involved with over the past year is the Leeds Learning Network.  I have blogged about some of the technologies and recently launched a Special Interest Group for SharePoint in Education on the SUGUK site, but it’s also good to see some of the less technical information becoming available.

A recent article on MSDN UK Schools Blog is one such post.

The Microsoft Learning Gateway 2007 components (www.codeplex.com/lg) include a version of the SharePoint Learning Kit (www.codeplex.com/slk) that has been updated to include the Observer Role (parent in Education context) and the ability to filter the contents based on the My Children connected web parts.

It has recently become apparent that the SLK version in MLG was based on the code branch from before the Version 1.1 release and has subsequently missed out on some of the key fixes including:

Compression fails for content with multiple levels – effectively the MLG version of SLK does not support a large number of SCORM Editors without this fix

64-bit support – MLG solution is currently only 32bit which is a problem when it is starting to become common practice to deploy 64bit solutions.

There is however some hope on the horizon, we have heard that it is planned to merge the code bases over the next few months so the MLG changes will be added back to the SLK code branch.

One thing is not clear is whether a multi-language pack will be created for MLG so that it falls inline with the SLK language support.   And if they are changing the MLG components making them work with Site Collections for School sites would be a nice to have out of the box

To support the growing use of SharePoint in Education we have created a Special Interest forum on the UK SharePoint User Group site specifically targeted at Education.  

This forum aims to cover all areas of SharePoint in Education from the Microsoft Learning Gateway, SharePoint Learning Kit,  Community Kit for SharePoint : Schools Edition to 3rd Party VLE integration, best practice, general support and user wish lists.   

Out hope is the forum will be used by

• Teachers and Students who have a SharePoint solution in their school or college
• IT support people who install and manage these school based installation
• Local Authorities who provide managed solutions
• SharePoint developers and consultants who work in education 
• solutions providers to support there products and looking for ideas on new features

to share experiences, pain points, and just help improve what we can achieved and through its inclusion in the SUGUK we should see some cross over in support and expertise.

The forum is open so please use this to ask questions,  make suggestions or generally talk about what’s hot and what’s not.   

Want to see something specific in your school?  ask the question – someone may have an answer, have the code to share or just might be willing to write something.

Are you doing something really great that you want to share?

I have been working with SharePoint in an Education setting for the past year or so initially working with RM on the Scottish Schools Digital Network project Glow Scotland; which at the time was regarded as one of the largest SharePoint Portal Server 2003/WSS v2 projects in the world linking Scotland’s 800,000 pupils and educators.   I am currently working with Synetrix/I2Q upgrading the Leeds Learning Network from SharePoint 2003/WSS v2, the Microsoft Learning Gateway and Class Server v4 to the latest MLG 2007 platform on MOSS 2007 and the SharePoint Learning Kit  (more info here);  and the successful bid by Synetrix/I2Q for the East Midlands to provide the Infrastructure and ISP services to Education which has SharePoint and the MLG as a key component.

The interest in SharePoint in Education is increasing exponentially,  the use of My Sites as the ‘approved’ MySpace or Facebook is starting to happen with early years pupils happily adding content to their My Sites.

If you have an interest in, or are working with, SharePoint in Education I recommend you subscribe to the Microsoft UK Higher Education Blog where Dominic Watts is posting some useful information and events, including the Higher Education Consortium which has been started to address missing, but critical, teaching and learning work roles and start the collaborative process for using SharePoint as the development platform.

There is a lot of information being published and these links provide a good starting point,  if you have any more please add them as comments.

http://www.microsoft.com/education/default.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/default.mspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/ukschools/default.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/education/schooloffuture.mspx

I will be bring further posts on my work on the Community Kit for SharePoint,  projects in Education in the UK and any interesting articles that I think will be useful to the community at large.