Hello everyone,

As discussed previously, Ian has recorded some videos to update ZFG on development activities for Release 2. Please find the links below:

Part 1: Agenda, Theme/Scope, Background and Discussion

Part 2: Demo

Part 3: Next Steps

Please watch these at your leisure, and distribute them internally as required. A webinar has been arranged in one weeks time (15th Dec, 14:00) to give you the opportunity to provide feedback to the team, and ask questions.

If you can, please email these to either the ZFG mailing list or myself. Ian is away in Bruges for the Christmas market until the 15th, so any mails direct to him might not be answered until then!

Thanks,

Chris

All,

I have captured the video for the last presentation, and converted it into several parts for easier downloading/viewing.

Part 1: Roadmap review
Part 2: Demo of Plymouth “live”
Part 3: Plymouth team discuss their “pilot” experiences
Part 4: Whats Next
Part 5: Feedback from call attendees (the last 5 mins are missing due to recording problem)

I have recorded these as .wmvs this time rather than flash. We will need to see how it goes with this approach, both the .wmv’s and slicing it up (which took a LONG time). Next time I may just provide as a flash video in the web again, but provide the time-stamps for each area so you can skip to the bit you want.

Any questions or queries, please drop me a line

I am more than aware that we have been quiet recently. I just want to reassure everyone that this is not a result of “nothing happening”. In fact, I can confidently say its been because the reverse has occurred!

Over the last 10 weeks, the team have been working closely with Plymouth to prepare for the pilot release of the student interface for the start of term. We are on track to achieve this goal, working with a small subset of lists (covering 22 modules) serving around 1000 students. The pilot itself is focusing on what I will term “core” functionality, though there are one or two “nice things” in there which I hope you will like! More in the demo…

…which I will be scheduling in around 2-3 weeks, once we have gone live, to cover project progress in more detail and provide a run-through of what we have delivered.

If there are any immediate questions, please email or ring me.

I have just sent a webinar invite out to the wider focus group for a project update, on the 29th of July (10:30am). This will get into some more depth on the email chris sent out recently regarding the project over the next 12 months, look at some student discovery prototypes, and look at what we’ve done in the first 2 iterations leading to the pilot.

Its a bit tricky keeping the webinar invite list up to date – so if you have not received an invite, and would like one, drop me an email and I’ll get you added to the list. On the flip side, if you got an invite and didn’t want them in future, drop me a mail too!

Cheers
Ian

I’ve recorded the video for Sprint 7, and have split this into three parts:

Part 1: Review of Research and Development (powerpoint)
Part 2: Demo of new features added in Sprint 7 (live)
Part 3: Student Discovery, and What’s next (powerpoint)

Enjoy!

As discussed in Sprint 7, we are planning to run several student focus groups to to explore some of our ideas around student discovery. Plymouth have already signed up – are you interested in hosting a similar event?

Although we’re still in the planning stages of how to organise an event, we would be looking at up to a dozen students (who we will pay!). Depending on the stage in development, the make-up of the students and what we would be doing, is liable to change.

If you feel this is something you could put together, drop me an email.

The Sprint demonstrated two milestones:

1) The successful import of Sheffields lists from TalisList to Zephyr
2) The implmentation of new “List of Lists” and “List” management screens

Additional functionality was also shown, namely “Tag bundles” and “Citation Preferencing”

Several items of feedback were provided by advisory customers, beyond general enthusiasm for the new changes:

- Place the count of resources within a section in the section heading
- Provide a user preference for a user viewing a list to determine if it is collapsed or expanded
- Provide a “generic” template (resource-type non specific): This could also be used for data conversion where the resource type couldn’t be determined – the list maintainer would then be allowed to move metadata from a generic template to a known resource type
- Provide a “generic” citation view, for lecturers who don’t want a specific citation style initially shown
- Provide a default sort of resources within sections (none, Title A-Z, Title Z-A), defined at list level but with option to over-ride at section level. Manually moving a resource into a section, it would automatically float to the correct sort point
- Provide “Last Edited By” alongside “Last Edited Date”

We are planning, for Sprint 7, to look into the following areas:

- VLE integration (Blackboard and WebCT)
- Prototyping the student experience
- Users and permissions (“who can do what”)
- Continued analysis into citation styles and supported resource-type set

Customers are encouraged to review the latest build at http://zephyr.stage.talis.com/.

I have just scheduled this for 14th March, 2008, at 13:30. It will last 1hr 30mins. The aim is, in effect, to show the implementation of many of the features that I demo’ed in the interim demo 3 weeks ago, which were just prototyped at the time. We hope to also be able to show the first Talis List conversion. See you then!

As promised, we’ve moved our demonstration server to another location to make it more reliable. Previously, it was behind an old firewall which was causing it to frequently drop connections to the Platform.

The demo server can now be accessed from http://zephyr.stage.talis.com – although going to the old address will redirect you to the new location.

Please have a look, and send us your comments and thoughts. We’ll be updating the build on this box on the run up to Insight as we fix things and implement tweaks to the usability. We hope to see you there!

Here’s a link to the video for the 3rd sprint, provided on 10th Sept (from external customers perspective, its the 2nd but in project terms, its the third!)

Note: The audio levels are very low – listen to it with headphones and turn it up, and its passable. If anyone does have any problems, drop me a mail and I’ll get the video-editing chaps to tweak the volume.