Learning Gateway

Dear education teammate,

The Microsoft Learning Gateway Refresh for MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 is now publically available by downloading it from this site. For in additional information, non-technical discussions, and related resources, please visit http://www.learninggateway.net. For technical discussions and bug reports, please use the Discussions and Issue Tracker tabs on this site.

This refresh is designed to help you leverage your core Microsoft platform skills by delivering a set of web parts that will make SharePoint 2007 immediately relevant to the education and training market. To minimize the amount of time you need to spend configuring components, these web parts have been built to work together, and a new deployment guide designed to simplify deployment. Significant in this release is new information architecture that more clearly supports a diverse set of sites and workspaces, as well as better customization and use of in-built MOSS capabilities such as blogs and wikis.


Relevancy for your Customers
Making Microsoft’s platform, tools and productivity applications relevant to educators, students, parents and communities worldwide is critical if technology is to support quality educational experiences. This refresh positions you to lead the way with Microsoft’s platform and your expertise in the education domain. By leveraging the Microsoft Learning Gateway, you can quickly build enterprise scale solutions that support the transformative vision of any school, university or government system.

To help drive this relevancy, the following Web Parts are included in this refresh:

•IMS Upload
The IMS Upload web part represents as an import front-end to a basic SharePoint document library. The purpose of this web part is to populate the document library with learning-specific columns defined within the IMS or SCORM-compliant documents’ metadata.

•Meta Search
This web part supports dynamic search prompts based on columns in Content Types, requested by the end user as a search target. It is the partner application to the IMS Upload web part above, i.e. this search web part performs the search on learning objects in a document library populated with metadata using the IMS Upload web part.

•My Classes
This web part is to populate a list of the class sites that the user is a member of. It is based on My Teams web part from MLG 2005 as it provides the required functionality and can be easily configured for other sites other than classes, such as class staff and activity sites.

•My Children
This web part retrieves the logged on parent's children and their pictures based on Active Directory attribute and student relation with school site and provides a filter to other web parts on the page that reflect a parent view of data for a particular student.

•My Planner
My Planner will support the user's personal Exchange mailbox plus user selectable public mail boxes (calendars), SLK events for the current user and SharePoint events for the current user.

Key Features of this Release

Better MSFT Server Platform Alignment

• Deployment process, templates and application web parts rebuilt for compatibility with MOSS, SharePoint Portal Server 2007 and WSS 3.0.
• Deployment process refined for ISA 2006, SQL 2005 and Exchange 2007.
• Provision to introduce Forms Server as an optional component.
• Introduction of ISA 2006 forms based authentication.

Learner Management

• Introduces SharePoint Learning Kit (SLK) at appropriate points in the information architecture with enhancements to support the parent role.
• Class Server has been retired.
• A new document library based Learning Object Repository has been added with automatic META data extraction and complimentary META based search.

Better leveraging of new MOSS Capabilities

• Introduction of Blogs, Wiki’s and My Sites.
• Better use and strategic placement of Discussions, Surveys and Lists.
• Better use of current and global navigation.
• Improved granularity of audience targeting for documents, list items and news.

Improved Information Architecture

• Introduction of a district or LEA, top-level portal in a multi-school context.
• Unlimited number of member roles, replacing static parent, teacher, student roles.
• Improved cross-role / cross-institution collaboration.

Customization and Partner Support

• Support for more powerful, template based customization introduced via ASPX Masterpages.
• New deployment guide.
• Comprehensive partner training workshop resources.

What to Expect

• There are no upgrade scenarios considered from previous versions of Learning Gateway or SharePoint. The “framework” nature of the Microsoft Learning Gateway makes such upgrades and migrations an individual project, not a system-wide tool. Customers will be looking to you for leadership and guidance in this process.
• This release of Learning Gateway will only run on MOSS 2007, WSS 3.0, Exchange 2007 and ISA 2006.
• This release is still intended to be an example and demonstration architecture only. Most customers should not try this without assistance! Deployment by a suitably qualified systems integrator is required as this set of framework and accelerator code can not anticipate all customer requirements or environments, and some customization will almost certainly be required or requested.
• Deployment and provisioning tools will be released separately and are not included with this distribution.

Sincerely,


Mitch Benson
Industry Manager, Solutions
Worldwide Public Sector | Education