Hi All, Last week the core SchoolTool team -- Justas, Alan, Douglas, Gediminas and I -- met in Coimbra, Portugal at the Critical Software offices for our main planning meeting for the year. Critical, and its spin-off Critical Links, are responsible for their Education Appliance, which uses SchoolTool as its core SIS and user management system. See also http://education.critical-links.com/
I had met with the Critical Links marketing and product management staff in New Jersey, but this was our first time working with the technical staff in Portugal. We were able to occupy their "war room" right next to the Edge Box (for small business) and Educational Appliance (for schools) team throughout the week. On Monday we had a long meeting with Helder Sousa, Director of Software/Application Development for Critical Links. Thursday we met with Helder in the morning and with their user interface consultant, Vitor Carvalhinho of Tangivel. On Friday Gediminas and Justas met with the members of their staff directly responsible for packaging SchoolTool to give them some pointers. The rest of the time the SchoolTool team worked on our own issues. The Monday meeting was helpful to us understanding the history and context of the Education Appliance product. Essentially, after Intel did its first deployments of Classmate PC's to schools in the developing world, they realized they needed a simple to administer server as part of the package. They approached Critical because their small business-oriented EdgeBox product already had the non-educational infrastructure, and Critical had plenty of experience doing complex integration in the context of a low-administration appliance. So basically, all recent Classmate deployments include the Education Appliance and, in turn, SchoolTool. This is also most of the EA deployments, although not all. Critical Links is clearly trying to expand their sales in different directions. We then went over some of the changes CL has made to the version of SchoolTool they've deployed (still 1.2, unfortunately). This includes a somewhat cleaner, more minimal (e.g., no more gray boxes) style, some usability improvements (adding a person as the instructor of a section automatically adds them to the teacher group), and a bunch of bug fixes and translation updates, most of which were probably also made by us in subsequent versions. Helder gave us all the patches. Since this is the first time we've had to process a big dump of patches, we spent a while discussing how to process them. We received a dump of all SchoolTool-related bugs from their internal tracker. We also discussed having them use LaunchPad more to keep the collaboration working closer to real-time. They will be upgrading to SchoolTool 1.6 in the next few months, and we are going to move as many of their changes into a separate package to help simplify that process. Tuesday and Wednesday we went over our recent changes to SchoolTool, the state of the upcoming release, various nagging issues, and our plans for both the October Natty+1 release and the next two years. We created a graphical organizer for the future plans using Freemind, which I'll also publish shortly after I get a chance to clean it up and make it more comprehensible. The meeting Thursday with their UI consultant, Vitor, couldn't have been better timed. We've certainly been aware of SchoolTool's UI shortcomings, but were waiting for the right time to mount a big push rather than approach it in a piecemeal fashion. Also, we needed some fresh eyes and inspiration. Again, the details of what we worked out will take a whole mail in itself. I'd say the good news is that what's needed is not a radical departure but a better execution of what we've been trying to do, basically bringing back some elements (breadcrumbs, sidebar in most views) and more completely implementing others (proper tabs instead of buttons), and following a more consistent style guide. Overall, a very productive trip. --Tom _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~schooltoolers Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~schooltoolers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
