Archive for December 1, 2006

Richard | December 7, 2006
One comment

Sakai, Moodle, and ATutor Challenge Blackboard Patents

Yay.

A patent dispute pitting open source advocates for online learning technologies against Blackboard, the industry giant, became more bitter Thursday with the announcement that a formal request had been filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to revoke 44 of Blackboard’s patent claims.

Throughout the dispute, certain Blackboard actions have led open source advocates and others in higher education to mistrust the company, and that trend may continue with the collapse of the compromise negotiations. Concern about the Blackboard patents has grown in the last year, especially after Blackboard cited the patent to sue another company in the course management business, Desire2Learn. If Blackboard was willing to go after a competitor, what would prevent it from going after educators trying to do course management themselves? some academics wondered.

source: Inside Higher Ed, via Kairosnews

Category: Software/web |
Richard | December 1, 2006
One comment

Outlook Custom Forms – first attempts

I have always struggled with the great divide between Microsoft Outlook and our other information systems. Outlook can do so much, but I hesitate to make full use of it because its information is not stored in a way that is easily accessible to our web site. I also have not been too keen to fully immerse myself into the VBScript required to write a set of export routines to migrate data in that fashion.

I was pleased this week to discover a middle ground — Outlook custom forms. While they don’t improve the portability of information between Outlook and other systems, custom forms do give us some of the qualities of web forms within Outlook. I can create new data fields that don’t already exist in Outlook. I have full control over the layout of a calendar entry form, for instance. I can perform data validation and require certain fields. My main resource so far has been this Microsoft article.

As this is a new area for me, I could use some tips on how to get them to behave well. I have been stymied by the following problems:

  • I am not allowed to delete custom fields that I created yesterday.

  • I cannot create a scrolling text field with word wrap for free-form text entry.
  • A moderated calendar with a custom form shows the custom form to the user who is making the initial data entry but not to the moderator who receives the email notification containing the new event.
  • I have pulled away from setting up rooms and equipment as resources, because users must find them amongst all our users and groups in the Global Address List, whereas I can present the user with only the relevant options if I use a simple value list that is not linked to Active Directory objects.

Please let me know if you have some experience in this area!

Outlook screen 1

Outlook screen 2

Category: Software/desktop | Tags: , ,