Capita break to many things.

I’m quite glad we’re supported directly by Capita (although our LEA’s support team are pretty good) because I’m a bit of a control freak, but wherever possible we still avoid applying the new releases for at least a week and keep an eye on Capita’s SupportNet forums for problems.

I did consider running that commandline version of SOLUS as a scheduled job, but it seems to go wrong so many times I wouldn’t want to trust it and get in at 08:30 to the sound of screaming teachers ;)

The only manual updates we have to do are for things like FMS6 which aren’t covered by the automatic script. However, the changes to the SOLUS system that were applied recently seem like they are leading to the ability to handle these issues automatically also - which will be wonderful.

I still love the look on the staff’s faces when when I hand them the release notes listing the changes. Suprisingly, they aren’t too happy when there are 13 pages of changes to figure out.

Anyway… the instructions we received warned that it may take up to 30mins to apply the update. I don’t think that I should repeat the word I would use to describe this estimate!

I began the upgrade at 15.50 and got fed up at 17.00 when the SQL batch scripts were half way!!! I had to remote in to check that it had worked!!!!!!

Stupid SIMS.

Looking at the new technologies that can be used in learning the biggest brick wall you will hit *has* to be changing the attitude of whoever plans the curriculum development. Choosing the right courses and boards for students to study, as well as the number of staff allocated, is key to allowing good quality resources to be created.

This point is likely to be a key part in my action research over the next 12 months.

I’ve emailed all three speakers I saw and hassled them for powerpoints like you. Maybe I’m just lucky. I have the presentations from the first 3 VLE seminars on Wednesday and I’ll be putting the other 2 up over the next couple of days.

The one from the UltraLab speaker (Kevin Thompson) is available on his website now, but it does have some issues on Windows PCs because he’s embedded quicktime image objects rather than plain old jpgs.

I’ve just had a look and their website seems to be having some sort of trauma so I’ll try to get the PPT up this afternoon after school.

It seems that Onfinity are having a few problems with their website at the moment (and they’ve seemingly removed the page I was linking to) You could try visiting http://www.onfinity.info but it appears to be somewhat broken at the moment.

First, neither SLK nor Class Server require Portal Server. Both work fine with WSS. Class Server will only work with WSS 2.0, and SLK will only work with WSS 3.0+ so as you can imagine, SLK is intended to be the successor technology to Class Server.

SLK is an e-learning delivery and tracking tool built on SharePoint. Unlike Class Server, SLK is fully integrated with SharePoint (it’s a SharePoint Solution), and is much easier to install, deploy, configure and use than Class Server.

SLK is a community-source project, and will be free for both customers and partners. Although SLK requires SharePoint (and when I say SharePoint I mean either WSS or SPS), it is built on a componentized e-learning runtime called Microsoft Learning Components (MLC), which can be built into any application and does not require SharePoint.

SLK will run Class Server content, as well as SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 content, but SLK will *not* come with an authoring tool. Because it runs Class Server content, you will be able to use the Class Server Learning Resource Editor (LRE) to create content for SLK, and the LRE will be made available to non-Class-Server users for this purpose.

If you have any other questions, feel free to post them at http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=SLK.

Thanks,
– David Gorbet, Group Manager, MS Learning Server