With spring having officially arrived, the CLE team is hard at work on the upcoming release of version 2.8 of the rSmart Sakai CLE. It’s based on Sakai 2.8, which the Sakai community has tentatively scheduled for release at the end of March. If this schedule holds, we plan to release version 2.8 of the CLE in late May or early June 2011.   

In keeping with our typical practice, we are allowing for additional time between the Sakai release and the CLE release. We use this time to integrate new features and perform extensive testing, as well as develop additional documentation. As always, our goal is to ensure that the CLE provides the best combination of functionality and reliability, and that users have all the support resources they need.

rSmart’s Nate Angell Elected to Sakai Foundation Board

We’re pleased to share the news that rSmart Client Evangelist Nate Angell is among this year’s newly elected members of the Sakai Foundation Board of Directors.

Nate is one of two board members elected from a field of six highly-qualified candidates. Josh Baron, Senior Academic Officer at rSmart client Marist College, was returned to the board, where he has already served one term as board chair. Josh and Nate begin their terms in January 2011 and serve for three years.

At your institution, instructors may want to let teaching assistants use the Sections tool to make changes to section memberships. As a Sakai admin, you can grant TAs permission to edit student memberships for sections by "borrowing" permission for the Manage Groups function in the Site Editor tool.

To do so, first select or create a course site that you can use for testing--and be sure the course has sections in it, as well as some users with the TA role. Next, copy the site ID for this site, by selecting all of the URL to the right of the last backslash. The site ID will look similar to the following:

1ee68b8b-cd38-4024-acad-4e9c7d5fe72a

Then, go to the Admin workspace and follow these steps:

Last month, we released the first service pack for the rSmart Sakai CLE 2.7. This new release contains 180 bug fixes and many important enhancements, including integrations with a variety of third-party solutions:

Phoenix, AZ, November 11, 2009 – rSmart, the provider of enterprise support for open source application software in education, today announced the release of the second service pack for the rSmart Sakai CLE 2.6. Enhancements include a completely redesigned Site Statistics Tool version 2.0 with AJAX-based interface and expanded reporting, newly added features to the Discussion Forums tool, and numerous improvements to Portfolios, the Site Editor, Installer tool, LDAP, and SIS properties. This service pack also resolves 226 total issues, including 209 bug fixes and 17 enhancements. The rSmart Sakai CLE service pack 2.6.2 is based on the Sakai community version 2.6.1.

PHOENIX, AZ. (June 3, 2009) -- rSmart, the leading provider of support for open source applications in education, today announces the availability of the rSmart Sakai CLE 2.6. This represents the newest version of the industry’s first and only commercial distribution of the open source Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE). In conjunction with today’s release the company announces the availability of its new Premium Support offering for Sakai to provide even higher levels of client support.