Here are some news from Collaboraid:
We visited the NetLearning2002 conference which was a both fun and interesting experience. At the conference were people (mostly professors and teachers) from universities who are interested in e-learning as well as companies (mostly small companies like Collaboraid) excibiting their e-learning solutions. The e-learning market is extremely fragmented. There are more than 150 different e-learning solutions in use in Sweden today, some homegrown, others commercial. What's more is the e-learning systems are all very similar. The most positive thing I took with me from the conference is that people are genuinely interested in Open Source, mostly as a means of saving licencing costs, but still. Open Source emerged as the key selling argument and differentiator of dotLRN.
We are working on merging the dotlrn-1-0 release branch onto the HEAD where the I18N work resides. We are done with the dotlrn package and are working our way through the other packages. The improvements on the OpenACS 4.6 release branch need to be merged onto the trunk as well and I believe Jeff has already done much of this work.
Another task that I feel is important to do as soon as possible is to make dotLRN HEAD use the new portal package. I will check with Open Force what the status of that package is.
As soon as we are done with the merge we will tackle the issue of changing translations to be done on phrases rather than words. We are hoping that we will be able to find a good process for this work and maybe outsource some of it to the most active translators who need these changes.
When setting up our new dotLRN demo server (http://dotlrn.collaboraid.net) for the NetLearning conference I extended the TclWebtest script that sets up dotlrn demo data quite a bit. I am planning to set up four regression testing servers that are recreated from scratch every night for dotLRN (oracle and postgres for dotlrn-1-0 and oracle and postgres for the HEAD). I am hoping that this will help the dotlrn-1-0 testing process and help speed up the release. It will also help us spot bugs that we create on the HEAD early and make sure that dotLRN is installable at all times.
Before christmas we will be working on external authentication (a work that Andrew started) for the Heidelberg university.
Mohan is currently at the Bergen University installing dotLRN and talking about the specific needs that they have on an e-learning system.
