Release 11.0

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April 2011
Schoolbox brought to you by Alaress

 

Introduction

Alaress is pleased to present the latest update to Schoolbox.
This release focuses on removing the last traces of the old framework and administrative control and stabilising the submission system.
There are three key updates to Schoolbox in this release.

  1. New homepage customisation system.
  2. New and improved administration system.
  3. TASS & Synergetic support

It’s our best looking release to date and has required a massive effort, so we trust that you and your school community enjoy the improved version of Schoolbox. 
This document lists all changes since the last revision and is presented in five sections as follows:

 

Overview

The Alaress team have been working hard to bring you v11.0 of Schoolbox and we also delighted to welcome four new members to the Schoolbox community:

  • Bialik College - Melbourne
  • John Paul College – Frankston
  • The Cathedral School – Queensland
  • The Kings School - Sydney

We look forward to the feedback and ideas these new members will generate and their contributions to Schoolbox.
Alaress will continue throughout the year to bring you more new features to continually improve Schoolbox.
We trust that Schoolbox continues to provide a secure area for your entire school community to communicate, collaborate, manage information and share resources.

 

Major Updates

There are three (3) major changes to Schoolbox in this 11.0 release. These are:

New homepage customisation system

The new homepage customisation system allows inline editing of homepages. Components, colours and layout can be altered inline allowing the user to receive active feedback about the changes they are making to the homepage.  All components have been categorised to make finding components a little easier. You can now also add multiple copies of certain components to a homepage. (Poll, textbox, RSS, etc.).

New and improved administration system

The administration System has been completely re-written in a new framework. We have added a new dashboard page with statistics about the server. We have also added full control over the system config and lookup tables so you can now add your own groups or change the colours of the calendar system. 
Further to this we have improved the side menu and allowed files control. 

TASS & Synergetic support

We have added support for TASS school database and cleaned up lots of the Synergetic integration.

Minor Updates

CMS

  • New allowed files subsystem - the new allowed files subsystem is based on extension rather than mime. This should be more tolerant of files from different computers.
  • New multiple file up loader - the new multiple file up loader is flash based and allows multiple files to be selected in a browse window and automatically uses filenames as description.
  • Search functionality – you can now search on full names of users
  • File properties dialogue contains URL to enable copy and pasting from file resources
  • Zip file uploads - added ability for super users to upload a zip file and have it expanded into folders and files.
  • Added base64 encoding on URLs to avoid issues with ISA HTTP Filter.
  • Teachers can now differentiate subjects based on their code as we have added subject codes to multiple destination file uploads.

Homepage

  • New TinyMCE layout with more functions - use the last button to expand to show all functions (includes font size, alignment, text direction).
  • The audio homepage module has now been restricted to only list audio files that it can play in the web browser. Other files will remain listed under the files homepage module.
  • New online chat component for homepages.

Core

  • Session management rewrite - now allows easier setup of sessions (Fixes kerberos SSO and admin user switching bypassing LDAP authentication).
  • Updated webmail version to roundcube version 0.5.1.

Welcome page

  • Added weather icon caching to avoid issues with loading weather icons behind school firewalls.
  • News: Added ability to target news to individual users and updated school news to use checkboxes rather the multi select on campus and group selection.

External data sources

  • Added staff phone extension from Synergetic to profile page.
  • Recoded Synergetic timetable to be more tolerant of out of order periods.
  • Added support for Synergetic contact alerts via student profile page.

Calendar

  • Improved support for submission events throughout the calendar.
  • Added detail and location to calendar events.
  • You can now add group calendar events via the class page/home page module. 
  • The group calendar homepage now displays events correctly. 
  • Added a print style sheet for the calendar to enable printing.
  • Added a smart date field, you can now type in dates like 'tomorrow', 'today','+2 days', 'next week', '2nd of February' and it will work it out for you.

Submissions and due work

  • New submission history page allows students to view submissions, marks and teacher comments in one place.
  • Altered due work page to have a unified recent work activity view to show due work and recent marks in one place.
  • Students now have their own page that provides a complete view of all submission boxes and marks. 
  • Online assessments - better support for online assessments via the marksheet.

 

Bug fixes

  • Multiple submission bugs relating to the status of submission boxes for students.
  • Improved mail send code to handle more situations.
  • Updated email detection to handle capital letters.
  • Fixed issue with displaying deleted news.
  • Fixed display issue when creating a new wiki.
  • Fixed issue with RSS limit config option.
  • External links on homepages will open in a new window.
  • Links in resource browser now work correctly.
  • Removed link to take test for assess creators (this may be added back in the future).
  • Added support for strange synergetic class codes including this starting with 0.
  • Fixed issue with links in html editor not opening in a new window.
  • Fixed lots of issues with events on homepages and linked to groups, including adding support for class based calendars.
  • Fixed multiple issues with file icons, including not handling word document icons at all.
  • Fixed teacher list to handle multiple teachers.
  • Fixed issue when search included ' characters.
  • Fixed image gallery formatting.
  • IE9 could not drag and drop files.
  • Fixed students not seeing marks entered via the staff mark sheet.

 

Known Issues

  • Some components when added to the page do not show up till refresh. (Image gallery, Image scroller). 
  • Some admin scripts are still running in the old framework, they will be completely ported in the next update.
  • Cannot load files from webdav to eportfolio.
  • Items may disappear from the side navigation if moved out of order to much.
  • Office 2007 documents uploaded before this release will not be showing the correct icon.