Team Blogs & Collected Feeds from rSmart

Here's some more info on one of my favorite features in the Kuali Financial System—global e-docs. I told you about the Account Global document last time I posted. This time I'll introduce Account Delegate Global.

Account delegates are KFS users that are authorized under certain circumstances to take workflow actions on a document in the place of an account's fiscal officer. The Account Delegate Global document allows users to create delegates for multiple document types on one or more accounts on a single document. Like other global documents, it's quite a time saver.

One of the batch jobs that was used often during development was the ClearCacheJob. However, just prior to 3.0 release it was removed from the default list of jobs. For some schools, it's still a nice job to have around.

Please note that this batch job is not perfect. Even though it would seem from the name that it should clear all the caches, in reality it does not and what it does clear out is sometimes inconsistent. So use it carefully and if all else fails, restart the application server.

To turn the ClearCacheJob back on, in your spring-sys.xml file make the following changes (either add the values to the lists, or even better, add this code directly to your own version of spring-sys.xml so you don't change any core code):

If you'd like more details about Colorado State University's experience in going live with the Kuali Financial System, you'll want to watch four videos we've just posted on YouTube. Recorded at Kuali Days 2009, the videos feature Patrick Burns, CSU's Chief Information Officer, and John Hunter, CSU's Accounting Manager Financial Systems Services. Here are the appropriate links:

Part 1 and part 2 (Patrick Burns)

Part 3 and part 4 (John Hunter)

A co-worker just sent me a link to the article "Sakai: Open Source … Open Minds" in the Dec. 13, 2009, issue of Learning Solutions Magazine. Written by Larissa Biggers, the article focuses on Sakai's collaborative learning environment. Ms. Biggers notes that the Sakai environment supports active learning on the part of students, with instructors serving as facilitators. She notes that "because the CLE is student-centered, students are in control of their own learning and ultimately, the outcome of their learning."

As a Kuali Days VIII attendee, I just received the following info from Scott Shepherd by way of followup. If you're interested in the Kuali Student System, you may want to know about the links Scott mentions. He says:

Kuali Student conference session materials are already available at http://kuali.org/files/schedule/schedule.xml. Additional materials, including the demo video and audio, will be made available in coming weeks. Please follow the Kuali Student Reporter (http://blog.student.kuali.net/) for updates on these materials and other news related to Kuali Student.

Jonny Brown
Sr. Information Architect
rSmart

Sometimes it's the simple things that trip you up. This happened to us when we were converting San Joaquin Delta College's building codes during their migration to the Kuali Financial System (KFS).

At Delta and many other institutions, building codes can contain ampersands and other special characters. KFS doesn't accept these characters in the Building Code fields. (If you're manually entering data through the UI, the system performs a validation that prevents you from entering invalid characters.) Entering special characters in these fields directly in the database causes errors, such as a PO remaining in "en route" status after approval.

For the third year running the Sakai Foundation will be co-sponsoring a reception at the Educause Annual Conference. If you’ll be at Educause this year I hope you’ll be able to join us. The other sponsors are DuraSpace, Jasig and Kuali. This has been a fun event that serves a few different purposes:

To say “Thank [...]

I’m happy to announce the release of Sakai 2.6.1. This maintenance release provides a set of bug fixes, language/locale updates and performance enhancements that improve upon the Sakai 2.6.0 release. Over 200 issues have been addressed by 2.6.1. Roughly half involve bug fixes while the remainder involve textual updates to language translation property bundles. In [...]

Release Date: 15 October 2009

The Sakai 2.6.1 maintenance release provides a set
of bug fixes, language/locale updates and performance enhancements that
improve upon the Sakai 2.6.0 release. Over 200 issues have been
addressed by 2.6.1. Roughly half involve bug fixes while the remainder
involve textual updates to language translation property bundles. In
particular, important fixes have been applied to the assignment, chat,
portfolio, Tests & Quizzes and site-manage modules while updates
for Catalan, French, Russian, Spanish and Swedish translations have
also been provided.