rSmart Sakai CLE Free Download FAQ

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First you visit our website: www.rsmart.com . Then you click on "Products" then "Sakai CLE" then click "Try it". At the bottom of that page is a link that takes you to a form that you need to fill out. After filling out the form you'll see a confirmation page. That page contains a link to the download page where you can download the software.

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The Free Download is an unsupported version of our CLE product. We have prepared this short FAQ to assist you in installing and getting up to speed on it. In addition, we’ve created a small Knowledge Base to try to address the most common issues you may run across with the download and deployment processes.

If you do not find answers to your questions in either the FAQ or the KB, you may submit a suggestion for a new Knowledge Base article by contacting us at: rsmartdownloads@rsmart.com.

For information on our fully supported products and subscription agreements, see our website or send an email to one of our sales staff at: info@rsmart.com.

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The rSmart Sakai CLE is a feature-rich, fully scalable, web-based environment, designed to support teaching and learning, project collaboration, group interaction and ePortfolio construction.

Based on the latest enterprise-ready code from the Sakai community, the CLE is branded and packaged by rSmart and comes complete with full support and documentation surrounding the release.*

*Support and Documentation isn't offered on the Free Download version.

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The rSmart Sakai CLE is a commercial distribution of an open source application, developed by a community and released by the Sakai Foundation, a 501c3 corporation, under the OSI Approved Educational Community License, version 1.0 (ECL).

Prior to version 2.4, the rSmart Sakai CLE was licensed under the ECL and supplemented by our subscription agreement. As of the 2.4 release (and subsequent releases), our CLE is fully open source. It is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 1.1.

We continue to use a subscription agreement with our clients to define our support obligations and service level agreement, but the subscription agreement is not a license that impacts the source code of our distribution.

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One of the primary purposes of the Free Download is to make it easier to install Sakai. We believe making it easier to install will encourage more organizations to evaluate Sakai for their own use.

While designed primarily to support informed analysis of the product, the Free Download is suitable to run in pilot as well as small production instances.

Although we cannot offer support surrounding this version of our software, we encourage visitors to download the CLE and explore its capabilities.

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Yes, source code is available upon request. To request a copy of the latest CLE Source Code, contact us at rsmartdownloads@rsmart.com and put Source Code Request in the subject line of your message.

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The rSmart Sakai CLE is an rSmart branded and packaged distribution of the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment. The CLE is comprised of the latest core Sakai release as well as a select group of tools classified as provisional within the Sakai code base. Provisional tools are included to complement and enhance the user experience and to provide better support for teaching and learning, research, group collaboration and electronic portfolio activities.

While the code base remains essentially the same as the community Sakai release, the rSmart Sakai CLE includes a significant number of enhancements that we believe add value to the out-of-the-box Sakai experience. Some of these enhancements include:

- Improved UI/Portal Redesign

rSmart has worked with a professional designer to redesign the Sakai portal and develop a more polished user interface.

- Enhanced Functional Configuration

rSmart has hand-chosen a group of tools that we feel most effectively supports collaboration and learning activities in an academic setting and configured them in a way that provides maximum flexibility for different teaching and learning modalities.

- New Tools

The CLE contains several tools not in the core Sakai release.

- Easier Install Process

We have engineered the CLE to be easier to install, and it comes with complete installation instructions.

- Easier Upgrade Process

We’ve made it easier to upgrade from one version of the CLE to the next by providing upgrade scripts and routines that ensure a smooth transition from one release to the next.

- Easier Integration Methods

We’ve built out alternative methods of integrating the CLE with enterprise student data on campuses. The CLE can process simple file extracts that include student, instructor, course, and enrollment data from an external system. This processing can be setup on a recurring basis to keep your CLE implementation in sync with your enterprise data.

- Enhanced Flexibility with Regard to Functional Configuration

The CLE offers an unprecedented level of configuration flexibility that allows institutions to decide how to set-up and maintain their environment. Choose from our pre-designed group sites, roles, and default selection of over 50 tools or define your own. The CLE also comes with a Customizer tool, which allows institutions to easily change the default configurations when they deploy the software.

- More Supported Platforms

The CLE supports all Sakai out-of-the-box platforms. In addition, rSmart offers support for IBM’s Webphere/DB2 platform and Microsoft’s MSSQL Server 2005.

- Sample Portfolio Data Structures

The CLE includes a sample set of data structures necessary to get started in building electronic portfolios.

- Additional Formal QA Process

rSmart works with the the Sakai community to test the community code base. For more information on the Sakai QA process, see the Sakai QA Workgroup page. In addition, we have our own QA team that re-tests our distribution to ensure that the platforms, configurations, migrations, integrations, tools and other capabilities that we support do in fact function as promised.

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