Stockholm University

Current Situation

A major deployment project is underway at Stockholm University (winter 2006/2007). This space will be edited to reflect current requirements, localisation effort and enterprise integration being done.

Integration Issues

Portal integration
SU is a uPortal institution and there are currently no plans to move away from uPortal. "Seamless" integration between Sakai and uPortal in the sense that worksites appear as tabs that comply to uPortal's organisational abilities does not seem to be on the near horizon. Instead, we could do integration by simply publishing the entire Sakai portal as an inline frame or web proxy under a tab in the portal and push that tab to all users. Users' initial Pubcookie log-in could be used to authenticate the Sakai session as well. Some skinning and UI work would be needed in both Sakai and our portal to avoid unnecessary UI confusion.

Or we could live with two separate "portals" for a while, devote resources to figuring out a solution to the issue.

File system integration
Sakai realm membership should be synchronised with AFS PTS group membership.
Preferably, resources in users' My Workspace should also be mapped to AFS home directories, or a folder within those home directories.

This will require us to figure out at way to dynamically create a potentially very large number of volumes (mountpoints or directories), set appropriate quotas, manage ACLs - as well as destroying or archiving those volumes when Sakai worksites are decommissioned.

Student Information System (SIS) Integration
We will probably try to avoid direct interaction with our legacy SIS ("Ladok"). Instead, we will most likely use LDAP as a means of transferring course information from the SIS to Sakai. Hence, our CourseManagementProvider will interact with our enterprise directory.
As for grading, we might consider using web services providing access to our SIS to do integration with the Sakai Gradebook. That could be an interesting challange

Whether sites should be automatically created from enterprise directory group information, or be created be demand is yet to be determined.

Although this is outside the scope of Sakai, we need to solve a major issue where instructor information and course information are completely decoupled in our enterprise directory (instructor is not a role).

Customisation Issues

Calendaring
Publish worksite as well as personal calendars outside of Sakai (read-only access) in standard format, i e iCalendar or RSS (pending such functionality in the schedule tool). N B SU does not currently have an enterprise calendaring solution, so we're sort of starting at wrong end here.

SU Look and feel
Local requirements for a localisation of the look and feel of Sakai will vary depending on whether Sakai is "integrated" with our uPortal (in which case it is important that Sakai tools look and behave as much as possible as legacy channels), or if Sakai is launched as a separate service. At any rate, a number of adjustments to the look and feel will be necessary - for the most part it should be enough to develop a localised Sakai skin.

Help Tool
We'd like to adjust the help section dispatcher so that it fetches help docs from our knowledge base where we really want to store this. It'll be localised anyway so we have to make some effort regardless.

Localisation
We'll have to await the i18n and l10n efforts before doing too much here. We'd probably want to offer the per-stie option of at least two langagues. We don't know how that would be possible. Basic translation into Swedish shouldn't be too much trouble.