Blogs

A First Sakai Conference

by rthornton

This was my first Sakai conference and so my first opportunity to meet many of the major players in the Sakai community.  Coming from a background in the Moodle community gave me a good idea what to expect, but I have to say I was impressed with the amount of free sharing and comraderie I found. But most of all I was impressed by the vision of how important teaching and pedagogy are to the design of Sakai 3 and how clearly the community wants to make that a reality.

For most people, conferences are about going to sessions. But I was so busy I hardly had time to make it to many sessions. In fact, the only session I sat through all the way, was the one I was presenting at.

Sessions

Sakai Conference Highlight: Basic LTI

by jbush

There was a lot of buzz at the Sakai conference around BasicLTI. Basic LTI is a standard way for externally provided tools to integrate with an learning management system or portal. It allows an LMS to launch into the external tool and securely provide user identity, course, and role information.

An Energizing Conference

by bbiltimier

The Sakai conference in Denver was very energizing. I enjoyed meeting many of our clients and members of the Sakai community who I work with virtually. It's nice to finally be able to put faces and voices to all those names, and it was interesting to go to some of the sessions and learn about how other people are using Sakai.  

Since I am strictly focused on support, I haven't had the time or opportunity to learn about what is coming up with Sakai 3. Going to some of those sessions was extremely valuable. I am now very excited to see Sakai 3 take shape and I hope to get to work on it someday soon.

As always, going to the Sakai conference gives me a new sense of energy and makes me realize how important it is in terms of what we do for our clients.

Sakai Conference: Sharing Challenges and Successes

by amehta

This was my first Sakai conference and it was great to meet a lot of rSmart clients and Sakai community members. There was a lot of enthusiasm about the performance improvements in the 2.7 release (e.g. Messages & Forums) and the new tools that are being offered (e.g. GradeBook2, Profile2, etc.). Many people were also excited about Sakai 3 and hoped that it will soon become available.

Tips for Tailoring KFS User Guides

by svijayan

When your institution implements the Kuali Financial System, your users will be successful more quickly if you provide customized user guides that reflect your unique KFS configuration and financial administration processes. Such guides are not replacements for user training. They serve, instead, as day-to-day references that help users work effectively with your KFS system and the associated procedures and processes.

The importance of understanding dependencies between modules in the Kuali Financial System

by ckensicki

Before you start building your institution's data elements and chart(s) of accounts, you need to understand the dependencies within the Kuali Financial System, especially dependencies between modules. For example:

Selenium Scripts for Kuali Financial System Posted on test.kuali.org

by fsteinken

Several weeks ago, I posted information about Selenium test scripts I've been creating to verify functionality in the Kuali Financial System. Approximately the first two dozen scripts have now been posted here as part of the Automated Testing (scripts) Project for KFS.

The test scripts that have been posted to date on the Kuali site are automated Selenium IDE scripts that can be run in FireFox.

We will continue to add more scripts to the list in the next several months and beyond. Additionally, the page will also list automated scripts for Selenium RC that can be run in other browsers.

To use the Selenium test scripts:

How To Prevent a Job from Being Scheduled Each Time the Server Starts

by asonkin

To unschedule a job:

Deploying different instances of the KFS with different CAS configurations

by mdesimone

We've come up with a way to deploy different instances of the KFS (such as test, production, and development) such that only the production deployment is configured to use the production CAS, while dev & test use the builtin CAS that comes with KFS. Most institutions want single sign-on in their production system but not in their test or development system. At San Joaquin Delta College we've addressed the differing CAS configurations by creating multiple versions of the source code file in which CAS is configured (web.xml). The build uses a different file depending on which instance is being built. This approach has saved us a lot of time because we don't have to change the code in this file each time we build.

Mike DeSimone
Sr. Technical Consultant
rSmart

KFS Accounting Line Import Feature Helps You Work Efficiently

by jbrown

As I explained in earlier posts, global e-docs are among the most helpful features in the Kuali Financial System. Another time-saving feature of the system is mass import of accounting lines and other data. This feature is especially helpful when users have multiple lines of accounting data to enter and do not want to enter each line separately. Using this feature, they can quickly enter data into an import template and then upload it into the appropriate electronic document.