New CLE TCC Vice Chair Elected

At the end of this month my tenure as the CLE TCC chair will end and the current Vice Chair, Beth Kirschner, will take the reins for the next 6 months. I am pleased to announce that Aaron Zeckoski will be the next Vice Chair for the TCC and in 6 months move into the Chair role.

Congratulations Aaron! We look forward to your leadership over the coming year.

Sakai CLE 2.8.0 Released

On behalf of the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) Technical Coordination Committee, I am pleased to announce the release of the Sakai CLE, version 2.8.0.

The Sakai CLE 2.8.0 builds on previous releases by refining and stabilizing the 2.x feature set. It offers dozens of new features and improvements to key areas like accessibility, internationalization, performance, and security.

Among the many enhancements included in the 2.8.0 release, noteworthy items include:
• Configurable URL shortening service
• reCAPTCHA support for logins
• Collapsible portal navigation menu
• Mobile portal UI improvements
• Experimental CKEditor implementation
• Respondus question import handling
• Customizable letter grades in assignments
• Support for IMS BasicLTI outcomes and improved external integration capabilities
• Enhanced user profile options
• Persistent event logging for Quartz Scheduler jobs
• Improved integration with external user providers (e.g., LDAP)
• Inclusion of many new webservices
• Updated language packs (Chinese, Dutch, French Canadian, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish and Vietnamese.)
• Feature to set open/close dates for discussion boards, forums and topics and sort the threads
• Ability to preview message prior to sending in Messages tool
• Ability for site authors to change display order of announcements

A full list of features can be found in the release documentation https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/x/0Al6B

Obtaining the 2.8.0 release
• Release artifacts are available at http://source.sakaiproject.org/release/
• Release documentation including install guides is available at https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/x/xQl6B

Licensing
Sakai 2.8.0 is licensed under the Educational Community License, version 2.0.

Older Releases
With the release of the Sakai 2.8 series, official Community support for Sakai 2.6 ceases. Organizations running Sakai 2.6 (or earlier versions) are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the latest versions of Sakai 2.7 or 2.8 in order to take advantage of continued maintenance support.

Our thanks go out to the dedicated Sakai Community volunteers from around the world for their tireless work on this release.

Sakai 2.8.0 release date rescheduled

On behalf of the Release Management Workgroup and the Sakai 2 Technical Coordination Committee I am writing you to let you know that the Sakai 2.8.0 release date has been pushed back. This can be traced back to a scarcity of resources in the Sakai 2 ecosystem that resulted in slipped schedules (ie late beta and release candidate tagging), final hour testing and subsequently, outstanding blockers.

The anticipated release date is March 31st with the following milestones.

• March 8/9 Release Candidate 2
• March 22/23 Release Candidate 3 (as needed)
• March 24-30 Prep for release
• March 31 Release

To reach these milestones the following strategy is being employed:

1. Blocker handling: Continue to triage the blocker list. If a ticket is not truly a blocker, downgrade it. In addition there will be regular communication with blocker assignees regarding progress on tickets.
2. Tagging: Continue to cut QA tags every two weeks until blockers are eliminated. If an opportunity exists to cut a QA tag early, do it. When no blockers exist, cut an rc tag and prep for release.
3. Continued testing: Encourage testing but do not allow shortfalls or delays in testing to hold up the release