Monday at 4pm is the first session I attended. This was originally to be held at 9:30am but was unfortunately reschedule for 4pm (to unfortunately conflict with other sessions of interest.) It was presented by the Luminis product manager with whom I will meet separately with Tuesday morning.
I did not expect any groundbreaking information in the session and was not disappointed. A general overview of Luminis and its use at a few colleges. There are now over 600 Luminis clients around the world. Here are the colleges highlighted:
- University College Dublin (UCD Connect): 22,000 students
- Regular access to UCD Connect in excess of 93%
- Measurable reduction in costs (I’m curious where these reductions were in the institution and how they were measured)
- North-Shore Community College (4000FTE – Pipeline)
- Retention rates up 5%
- 80% say services excellent or very good
- Montgomery College (MyMC)
- Univ Toledo
- Report Dashboard using Crystal Reports
Luminis Platform IV Overview
Pretty basic overview of IV and mention of workshops, training bay (SLC) and CBT updates to support it. Here was the Product Manager’s highlights of new features which I may expand on with my own set (if I have time):
- Groups (user sets): app level groups (announcements), fine-grained permission, fragment management (supports graceful degradation of fragments: silently disappear content from layout if not appropriate to role)
- i18n/l12n
- New Channels:
- Group Activity (Is there a way to ‘select all’ groups and courses to monitor for all applications?)
- Schedule TA channel: to allow easier access to people with this permission
- Manage TA channel: ditto
Beyond — through Banner 8 (next couple years)
- Enrollment Management Suite leverages Luminis components and includes portlets, workspaces and dashboards (and layout fragment enhancements). We did see a picture of a ‘recruiter’ screen presented with Luminis.
- Identity Management: support for 3rd party providers, they want to be a “good identity citizen”
- Rich text editing (WYSIWYG editor for text areas — why still so far off?)
- Mail/calendar interoperability with external systems (e.g., Outlook, Zimbra…). There is good growth of Zimbra in education, they are excited to work with it.
- Targeted Announcement API for wireless and other SDK work
- RSS Aggregator channel
- Course Studio Template system (this was supposed to be in Lum IV)
- Continue work on load/performance testing (not sure what this means)
- Add miscellaneous regulatory items
Beyond — post Banner 8
- Implement portal engine choice and flexibility. uPortal and Oracle portal server: development will occur in parallel. Migration between options will be supported. Timeline: 2009
- Channel drag-and-drop (as seen by another institution last year in Orlando)
- DLM with integrated modes
- System-wide search and file sharing capabilities
- Collaboration enhancements (plan on introducing Web 2.0 components such as blogging and wiki. By then we’ll be on Web 3.0)
Nothing unexpected but good to catch up with the Product Manager and arrange a follow-on meeting as we prepare to implement Luminis IV on our new Sun Solaris environment for Fall 2007.