Inclusive of:

1.  Stellar Brand Collaboration Services

2.  Content Services 

1. Stellar Brand Collaboration Services

Definition

The Stellar brand provides an enterprise-level environment enabling:

• Team collaboration - asynchronous and synchronous
• Course management functionality
• Discovery (search) and Social Networking functionality

...

Goals/Vision

Vision: A branded Learning and Collaboration environment, including..

• A Moodle-based course management component
• A coherent, complimentary, and secure set of tools for asynchronous and real-time collaboration:
  • within DLC's and classes
  • across DLC's and classes
  • for extra-Institute collaboration -- including access for the extended community (non-MIT colleagues, alumni, the world)

• 'Discovery' tools to facilitate collaboration across the Institute
  • enterprise tagging
    • for research and admin communities
  • secure search across all components, integrated with enterprise search
  • social networking functionality
• A Content and Collaboration portal
• Pedagogical Tools
  • Content creation and sharing
  • Discussion boards
  • Visual display of leaning materials
  • Support for participatory/active learning
  • Assignment Submissions
  • Access to Learning Resources
  • Textbook information for classes
  • E-books
  • Library resources
  • Evaluation and Assessment
    • Evaluation of course effectiveness
    • Assessment of student learning and achievement
  • Exams

..implemented in accordance with..

• core concepts..
  • on-demand, user actuated provisioning wherever possible
  • automatic provisioning of default 'Course Management' set of components
  • simplicity and ease of use
  • seamless transition among components
  • exploitation of integration points and linkages among components and with CCS components that live outside the 'Stelar' umbrella (e.g. adding Clearspace 'Community Anywhere' functionality to QuickPages)

...

Value / Benefits

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Current State

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• Openfire (Jabber) - in production

...

• increasing usage
• loose integration with current Stellar
• users and groups stored locally, mirroring Moira

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• wiki, blog, discussion, lightweight document management, social networking

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• users and groups are maintained in application

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• do it yourself - AFS lockers, Dreamweaver

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End State

The 'Stellar' Content and Collaboration environment is recognized Institute-wide as a suite of powerful, reliable, and easy to use services.

• a Moodle-based course management system is in production
  • preserves and builds on level of functionality currently available in Stellar
  • each course site is provisioned with components from the C and C suite (discussion forum, blog, etc)
• Clearspace is in production and serves as the core platform for Enterprise level collaboration and social networking functions. Includes:
  • Discussion forums
  • Blogging
  • Document-based collaboration
  • Social networking
• ad-hoc Web conferencing service is in place (e.g. dim-dim); pluggable in Clearspace and Wikis
• ad-hoc video conferencing - service is in place (e.g. extension of Openfire)
• Instant Messaging (Openfire) remains in production
• QuickPages is in production providing easy web page production for the community
• Digital media management - Thalia is in production
• @Stellar has expanded to be a general-purpose content and collaboration portal
• Enterprise Google search includes secure search across components
• Components are accessible from mobile devices
• Enterprise search (Google) includes secure search across all components of the Stellar Content and Collaboration environment

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Gaps

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Approach - e.g., working with community and others in IS&T

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• support the best outright
• re-do and implement others that are promising but need work

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Drivers (Tech trends/Biz trends, etc)

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Dependencies/Assumptions

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Risks

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Conceptual Architecture

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Ending slide: twist on Values/Benefits

Comments  (Hide)Craig says:
What the separation of content services as independent loses is that most of the used function in current Stellar is around materials / content. We could say it's collaboration between instructors, presented to a potentially limited audience, but the ideal would be for all content: Stellar, Thalia, and Quickpages, to share a common content store, so we need to clarify that overlap. Posted by Arti Sharma at Jun 18, 2008 10:00 | Edit | Remove | Reply To ThisAdd Comment

2. Content Services

Definition

Content Services are a set of web-based tools and web services for sharing, organizing, and storing content.

Goals/Vision

Vision: An environment for sharing, organizing and storing content, including..

• A coherent, complimentary, and secure set of Tools:
  • Thalia for digital media management
  • Thalia API providing media management capabilities to other applications
  • QuickPages for publishing websites

..implemented in accordance with..

• core concepts:
  • on-demand, user actuated provisioning wherever possible and appropriate
  • simplicity and ease of use
  • plug in other CCS tools where possible and appropriate (e.g. adding Clearspace 'Community Anywhere' functionality to QuickPages)
  • make content and content services available to other applications

• we match the way users do their work
  • simple, usable, useful
  • we'll keep up to date with web application design patterns
  • user requests/usability given significant weight in development plans

• we encourage content use and re-use 
  • e.g. exporting digital resource collections for other services to import  (images in Stellar -> OCW -> Libraries)
  • e.g. direct URLs for users to paste images etc. into their own blogs
  • e.g. tagging, to help users discover items
  • e.g. RSS feeds from Thalia and QuickPages, and RSS reader as a component on a QuickPages site.
  • e.g. encourage use of good taxonomies by demonstration and education

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Value / Benefits

• Secure and stable digital resource storage
• Encourage use and re-use between applications
• Easier, more efficient creation and maintenance of web content for the community
• Sharing and privacy control
• Keep prestigious content in an MIT site, which adds credibility to the author and more prestige to MIT (i.e. don't make your Nobel prize winner use Flickr)

Current State

...

• do it yourself - AFS lockers, Dreamweaver, consultants
• consultants usually costs departments $2K-$7K
• DIY makes a big project out of a simple site

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End State

• QuickPages is in production providing easy web page production for the community
• Digital media management - Thalia is in production
• Thalia back end services are consumed by other applications like Moodle
  
• Thalia goes open source and is further developed by  outside community

Gaps

Approach - e.g., working with community and others in IS&T

• Work with Stellar and other IS&T teams on integration
• Work with academic, research, community and administrative stakeholders. At present these include PSB, DCAD, ACCORD and others.
• Use IAP, IT Partners, ACCORD and other venues to publicize content services for broader adoption.
• Assist MIT developers in building applications which consume our media APIs
• Consult with Kerberos team for best practices in making a project Open Source and building outside community involvement.
• Partner with DCAD, PSB and the Help Desk for customer interaction and support

Drivers (Tech trends/Biz trends, etc)

• need for stable, secure storage
• this is how people do their work now
  • web is the medium of choice
  • people throw up millions of images on flickr
  • it's impossible to keep track of digital resources without tools
  • these digital resources have an intrinsic value to the Institute

Dependencies/Assumptions

relies on:

• network operations being able able to support services at the level they need  e.g. Thalia redundancy
• common services being available and stable
• where 3rd party software in use, presupposes that it may be adapted to use our common services
• users being aware of content services

Risks

• see above
• Shared services we integrate with might be confusing or difficult to users   -- e.g. managing Moira groups is not intuitive or user friendly
• Standard risks from using third party or open source components
• Ability to scale to meet demand, given limited resources
• Losing focus - many customers with divergent needs
• Dependence on multiple services create more potential points of failure
• More consumers of our services requires more resources on our part for:
  • maintenance
  • new functionality requests
  • support
  • infrastructure: equipment, power, overhead
• Technologies change. That's a given, not a risk. We need to anticipate and plan for that.

Conceptual Architecture

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See attachments.