OAE v16.0.0 Harpy Eagle

Harpy Eagle

You can find more about the Harpy Eagle here

16.0.0 is OAE's latest major release to date and it mostly includes architectural changes in order to make OAE more manageable and easier to contribute to.

Changelog

The most important change is having ditched RabbitMQ and replaced it with Redis. This was due to several reasons:

• Queueing via RabbitMQ adds unnecessary complexity to OAE in terms of architecture and maintainability
• RabbitMQ lacks a proper high-level node.js library
• Background queueing can be done efficiently by Redis, which has quality high-level libraries for node.js and was already used by OAE anyway (for caching)
• OAE becomes easier to maintain and deploy
• OAE becomes faster
• OAE becomes easier for beginners to contribute to

Some other libraries have been updated, including node_redis (to ioredis), redback (to redlock) and nodemailer.

There are many other fixes, including:

• CircleCI optimization to reduce testing times (to less than half the previous time)
• Push notifications using redis pubsub
• Code quality fixes (thanks to code climate)
• Improvements to OAE dev dockers

15.1.0

Release notes

Features

• Ethercalc integration (collaborative spreadsheets)
• Ability to join groups with moderation
  • Groups may now be "joinable" or "joinable by request"

Fixes / enhancements

• Moved most of the codebase to ES6 modules
• New oae-version module with useful git checks
• Introduced a migrations mechanism that allows for several concurrent Hilary processes to boot at the same time (pm2 cluster mode)
• Introduced a "wait-until-ready" feature in Hilary boot sequence, with a retry mechanism for:
  • redis
  • rabbitmq
  • elasticsearch

Chores

• Updated several libraries (including puppeteer)
• Moved to Cassandra official 2.1 docker image
• Removed the hilary-deps base image for Hilary docker

15.0.1

Release notes

• Removed webshot and replaced it with puppeteer (chromium)
• Fixes for dealing with inconsistent data (post tenant migration issues)
• Removed several unused modules: oae-release-tools, oae-uservoice, oae-mixpanel and oae-mediacore
• Adopted conventional commits
• Removed unused dependencies such as grunt and bunyan-syslog
• Replaced pdf2htmlEX and "pdftotext` for mozilla's PDF.js (https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js)

OAE v15.0.0 Snowy owl

Snowy Owl

This version is all about shaping the path for the future with some changes focused on making onboarding and developing on OAE simpler. That includes upgrades to node and NPM, ditching grunt and grunt plugins, new XO/prettier styling and a set of new features (see below).

Changelog

• Ability to export personal data
• New rabbitmq library
• New cassandra library
• Updates to several dependencies (WIP)
• CircleCI and docker enhancements

OAE Quetzal

The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project is delighted to announce a new major release of the Apereo Open Academic Environment; OAE Quetzal or OAE 13.

OAE Quetzal is an important release for the Open Academic Environment software and includes many new features and integration options that are moving OAE towards the next generation academic ecosystem for teaching and research.

Changelog

LTI integration

LTI, or Learning Tools Interoperability, is a specification that allows developers of learning applications to establish a standard way of integrating with different platforms. With Quetzal, Apereo OAE becomes an LTI consumer. In other words, users (currently only those with admin rights) can now add LTI standards compatible tools to their groups for other group members to use.

These could be tools for tests, a course chat, a grade book - or perhaps a virtual chemistry lab! The only limit is what tools are available, and the number of LTI-compatible tools is growing all the time.

Video conferencing with Jitsi

Another important feature introduced to OAE in Quetzal is the ability to have face-to-face meetings using the embedded video conferencing tool, Jitsi. Jitsi is an open source project that allows users to talk to each other either one on one or in groups.

In OAE, it could have a number of uses - maybe a brainstorming session among members of a globally distributed research team, or holding office hours for students on a MOOC. Jitsi can be set up for all the tenancies under an OAE instance, or on a tenancy by tenancy basis.

Password recovery

This feature that has been widely requested by users: the ability to reset their password if they have forgotten it. Now a user in such a predicament can enter in their username, and they will receive an email with a one-time link to reset their password. Many thanks to Steven Zhou for his work on this feature!

Dockerisation of the development environment

Many new developers have been intimidated by the setup required to get Open Academic Environment up and running locally. For their benefit, we have now created a development environment using Docker containers that allows newcomers to get up and running much quicker.

We hope that this will attract new contributions and let more people to get involved with OAE.

12.6.0

The release includes new features, usability improvements and bug fixes.

Changelog

Set group description to use relative links

Users can now link to other documents on the same OAE instance in group descriptions, and the links will be automatically converted to be relative to each users tenancy in multitenancy groups.

Handling users in disabled tenancies

We have improved the way users in disabled tenancies are managed - for example, no emails will be generated for such users in the future.

Change default Shibboleth configuration

The order in which attributes are requested from Shibboleth was changed to request least intrusive attributes first (although tenancies can make changes to this default configuration). A migration script was written to ensure that this will not cause any unexpected behaviour for existing tenancies using Shibboleth authentication.

New API endpoint

There's a new API endpoint for administrators to see all users in a tenancy at /api/tenants/:tenantAlias/users.

Updated UI dependencies

In 3akai-ux, we have updated Font Awesome icon library to a more recent version and changed our old, unsecure markdown library for a more recent one.

Added back button to 404 and 401 pages

There's now a button on 404 and 401 pages that takes the user to the previous page. Additionally we have fixed the bug where the browser's back button would fail to work as expected on these pages.

12.5.0

This release comprises some new features, usability improvements and bug fixes.

Changelog

Administration improvements

Both tenant and global administators can now use the administration interface to add a new logo for a tenancy.

Search improvements

Private tenancies will no longer have content from other tenancies showing up in the search and similarly their content or users will never be visible in the search results of other tenancies.

Linked content improvements

If a link is created pointing directly to a file, we will no longer trigger a download prompt when it's opened. Instead, OAE will attempt to embed the file where possible.

Activity feed and email bug fixes

A bug where some user thumbnails occasionally caused a 401 error in the activity feed was fixed, as was an error where some characters were rendering incorrectly in emails.

Group bug fixes

Deleted users will no longer have links to their homepages in groups. Additionally, a bug where a user's name would sometimes not be displayed correctly in a group's members list was fixed.

New API endpoint

There is a new API endpoint at /api/user/<user-id>/groups/recent for displaying a user's recently visited groups.

OAE Ibis

OAE Ibis brings the ability for institutions to completely customise the content and look of their tenant landing page. OAE Ibis also implements a detailed user tracking framework and brings the long-awaited full-text indexing and searching feature. Next to that, OAE Ibis also ships a range of other search improvements and a large number of accessibility improvements.

Changelog

Customisable tenant landing pages

OAE Ibis makes it possible for institutions to completely customise their tenant landing page, allowing them to appropriately contextualise their tenancy, present themselves and explain the main purpose of the tenancy.

Tenant administrators are able to add any number of text, video and image blocks to the landing page, set their styling and determine their width on different devices, allowing for a fully responsive landing page to be configured. All configured text can also be fully internationalised.

We are already looking forward to seeing what the institutions will come up! We'll definitely publish a list of the best ones in an upcoming blog post.

User tracking

OAE Ibis introduces a detailed user tracking framework to provide a complete overview of how OAE is being used. Using an integration with a 3rd party service called Mixpanel, OAE can now keep track of almost all usage-related information: how many users have signed in, how many content items have been created and what is their distribution in visibility, how many comments were added, how many public groups are there and how does this evolve over time, etc.

This provides a solid basis for making product decisions based on real usage data and opens the door to performing A-B testing on new features. In a future release, we will also be providing this information to tenant administrators to give them a complete overview of how and how actively their tenancy is being used.

Full-text indexing

Following numerous rounds of performance testing, OAE Ibis brings the long-awaited arrival of full-text indexing and searching. The full content of all uploaded PDF, Office and text files will now be indexed and included in searches, making it a lot easier to find the content you're looking for or discover interesting new content.

Accessibility improvements

As the first step in the process of trying to obtain a WCAG 2.0 accessibility certification for OAE, a full external accessibility review of the OAE software has been undertaken by WebAIM. They delivered a review document containing a list of recommended accessibility improvements, which is something we'll be publishing and discussing in an upcoming blog post.

OAE Ibis includes accessibility improvements for the most critical issues that were identified in the review, with more accessibility improvements planned for upcoming releases.

Search improvements

Next to providing full-text searching, OAE Ibis also introduces a number of additional search improvements.

When searching for people, there will now be a slight bias towards people from your own institution. This should make it easier to find the people you're looking for, and is the first step towards making further improvements in this area.

Searches in content and discussion libraries will now also include the text of the comments and discussions posts, making it easier to find the content item or discussion you're looking for.

9.2.0

This upgrade will introduce the following new features and enhancements:

• Improvements to folders and how they can be used to organise content in groups. Folders created in the context of a group no longer have to be a part of your personal library, and some of the restrictions around which items you can add to folders have been refined
• Group membership libraries will now always list both direct and indirect groups the user is a member of and will show the newest groups at the top, making it easier to find the group you're looking for
• Group membership libraries will now always list both direct as indirect groups the user is a member of
• The ability to reprocess content for a particular tenant
• Some email styling improvements
• Facebook authentication fix
• Various bug fixes

9.1.0

This upgrade will introduce the following new features and enhancements:

• The ability to comment on folders
• The ability to add basic markup to comments and discussion posts (bullet points, quotes, etc.)
• Links to content items, discussions, groups, etc. in a comment or discussion post will be modified to point the user to the correct tenant
• Improved performance when loading long lists of items
• Addition of a full Welsh translation of the UI
• Full translations of folders functionality in Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Polish and Spanish
• Improvements to the preview images displayed in activities
• Timestamps in email messages now reflect the timezone of the tenant
• Folder thumbnail improvements
• Various bug fixes