Installing and Upgrading

The Sakai 2.5 Install Guide provides information on how to install Sakai 2.5.0, or upgrade from a previous version of sakai. If you've upgraded Sakai versions in the past, you will find the process essentially unchanged and database conversion scripts are supplied in the release to help you migrate your data to the 2.5 database schema.

What's New

The following sections provide an overview of what is new in this release. A more detailed list of enhancements is available from Jira, our issue management system: Enhancements and Fixes (2.5). A complete list of tools included in this release is also available.

• Tool Promotions
• Tool Enhancements (Core and Provisional)
• General Enhancements
• Contrib Tools

Tool Promotions

Tools Status Definitions:

• Core – tools with which the community has a great-deal of experience and confidence in their robustness, stability, and scalability, and which are enabled by default in the release.
• Provisional – tools which the community has less experience, and which are disabled by default in the release.
• Contrib – tools with which the community has little experience, often are still in early stages of development, and are not recommended for broad usage in a production environment. (Contrib tools are available separate from the release, in the Contrib area of Sakai's source repository.

General Enhancements

Accessibility WG

• Outcomes from 2.4 accessibility review influenced many changes and improvements for 2.5.

Internationalization WG

• Currently Available
  • Arabic
  • English/UK (new)
  • Catalan
  • Simplified Chinese (updated)
  • Dutch (updated)
  • French/Canadian (updated)
  • Japanese (updated)
  • Korean (updated)
  • Portuguese/Brazilian (new)
  • Portuguese/Portuguese (updated)
  • Russian (new)
  • Spanish (updated)
  • Swedish
• Translation Underway ( Translations will be merged to maintenance branch as they are finished.)
  • Traditional Chinese
  • Danish
  • French/France
  • German
  • Hebrew
  • Mongolian
  • Slovakian
  • Turkish
  • Vietnamese

User Experience WG

• iFrame-less Accessible portal (PDA Portal).
• Skin improvements:
  • Restyled the default site tabs to appear as literal tabs.
  • Added icons for all the core tools.
  • Optional treatment of the "More Sites" drop-down as a pop-up window organized by site type.
    • This feature is disabled by default; enable in sakai.properties by setting portal.use.dhtml.more=true.

Content Hosting Service

• Improved performance by rewriting underlying Storage of entities to reduce memory usage and CPU load.
  • Upgraded Sakai instances will not be able to take advantage of all performance improvements until they have converted their existing Resources. See Content Hosting Conversion for more details.)
• Re-factoring of database to eliminate bottlenecks in the underlying content hosting service.
• Preliminary support for the integration of JSR-170 repositories
• (See also Resources above.)

Content Review

• Minor changes in APIs and to integration with Assignments; only applicable to sites running a content review implementation (e.g., TurnItIn).

Database

• Addition of a faster lower memory footprint entity parser based on SAX.
• Addition of an optimized binary entity serialization.

Email

• Added bulk header to email notifications.
• Improved handling of long URLs in emails.

Memory

• Centralized management of Hibernate Cache provision.
• Replacement of MemoryService cache with ehcache in preparation for cluster wide cache optimizations.
• Upgrade to ecache 1.3 to enable JMX capabilities.

Portal

• Addition of site categorization.
• Addition of tool categorization.
• Improved experimental iFrame-less tool presentation (a.k.a. PDA portal).

User Directory Service

• Improved performance when retrieving provided users.
• Support for login IDs (for Kerberos authentication, for example) which differ from user EIDs.
• Optional short-term authentication caching to greatly improve DAV performance.
• Can now enable or disable User Directory Provider implementations via the sakai.properties file.
• Reduced number of required methods in the User Directory Provider interface.

Tool Enhancements

A brief overview of functionality added or improved since the Sakai 2.4 release.

Account

• Option to sync user data between Account and Profile tools.

Assignments

• Allow grading for students that have not posted any submissions.
• Non-electronic submission type.
• Notifications for new submissions.
• Upload all.
• Reordering of assignments (like Resources).
• Improved Assignments-Gradebook integration.

Attachment Widget

• Changed default security setting for viewing attachments from security-by-obscurity to forcing a user to login first.

Chat Room

• Ability to delete all chat history for a given room.

Citations Helper

• Import citations in RIS format from other tools such as RefWorks and Endnote.
• Sort citation lists by author, title, or date.
• Search for and embed citations from within the WYSIWYG Editor (FCKeditor) in Sakai tools.

Forums

• Ability to delete forum messages.
• Added synoptic views for Home.
• MessageCenter was previously separated in 2.4 into Forums and Messages.

Help

• Support for help content in multiple languages.
• Added sakai.properties setting to hide help collections.
• Added tool registration property to register additional help collections.
• Updates to help content from Indiana University (IU) Knowledge Base for 2.5 functionality (as provided by project leads and IU KB team).

Gradebook

• Support for categories and weighted categories.
• Added percentages as a grade type option.
• Added letter grading as a grade type option.
  • This feature is disabled by default; enable in sakai.properties by setting gradebook_enable_letter_grade=true.
• Import grades using a downloaded spreadsheet template.
• Individual student grade reports for instructors.
• Enable an instructor to "see what a student sees".
• Allow export course grades in addition to export gradebook.
• Blank grades now treated as null (rather than previous treatment as 0).
• Introduction of grader permissions (ie grading by group and/or section).
• Usability enhancements in workflow and layout.

Messages

• Ability to bulk Move and Delete Message.
• Ability to forward Messages.
• Added synoptic views for Home.
• MessageCenter was previously separated in 2.4 into Forums and Messages.

Portfolio (OSP)

• Promoted from Provisional to Cores status.
• New XSLT portal.
• Aggregated View of Matrix and Portfolios.
• Expanded sharing capabilities for Portfolios.
• Many user interface bug fixes and improvements.
• Group-aware matrices.
• Assignment references within Matrix/Wizards.

Profile

• Option to sync user data between Account and Profile tools.

Resources

• Replaced dropdown widget for Add and Action menus with an accessible one.
• Dropboxes
  • Students and Instructors can now choose to email each other when they upload to a Dropbox.
  • Instructors can now see a visual indication of which folders contain recently updated content.
  • Removal of inappropriate options from Dropbox interface.
• (See also Content below.)

Roster

• New UI with a separate tabular view for profile and official institutional photos.
• Integration with Course Management API to display enrollment status information.
• Expanded permission scheme to retain the Roster's general use purpose while incorporating course-specific features.
• Significant performance improvements.

Schedule

• Performance improvements to reduce memory load of schedules with a large number of items.
• iCal subscription export service and import; reoccurring events are not yet supported
  • This feature is disabled by default; enable in sakai.properties by setting ical.experimental=true.

Section Info

• Download or print a roster list that provides each student's section memberships.
• Better enforcement of the maximum section size.

Tests & Quizzes, a.k.a. Samigo

• Promoted from Provisional to Core status.
• Allow feedback to be viewed right after an assessment is submitted.
• Allow ability to move/copy/remove multiple questions to other pools.
• Allow ability to adjust score in edit assessment screen.
• Allow ability to remove published assessments.
• Add event logging for user operations.
• Allow copying of all questions in a part to a selected pool.
• Allow students' responses to be exported to Excel.
• Allow point values of questions to be reset when a random draw from pool part is created; all questions from the pool are copied to the part.
• Further details are available in the Tests & Quizzes/Samigo Release Notes.

(Provisional) Blogger

• Internationalization improvements.
• Switch to using same WYSIWYG editor as other tools in Sakai (FCK editor).

(Provisional) Data Warehouse

• Separated from OSP to realize its general usefulness for reporting functionality.

(Provisional) Linktool

• Updated documentation.
• Now deploy SakaiSigning.jws to webservices by default.
• Added placement id to list of parameters passed.
• Support for specifying additional parameters in the tool setup or URL.
• Cleaned up tool formatting and validation.
• Added new default verification script.

(Provisional) Page Order Helper

• Improved keyboard accessibility.

(Provisional) Podcasts

• Permissions now a reflection of permissions in Resources.

(Provisional) Polls

• Now uses WYSIWYG (FCKedtior).
• Improved date picker.
• Improved data validation.

(Provisional) Reset Password

• Added to release as a Provisional tool.

(Provisional) Search

• Addressed critical indexing errors for clusters with a journaled indexer.
• Reduced memory usage in indexers.

Fixes Included in this Release

Fixes (2.5) – a list of fixes included in this release.

Open Issues

Open Issues (2.5) – a list of open or unresolved issues that affect this release.

Maintenance Branch and Maintenance Releases

After each release, work continues on resolving bugs, including ones identified after the release. In addition to fixing these bugs for the next release, when appropriate, the fix is also placed in a "maintenance branch", from which you can easily incorporate the fixes into your own local deployment of Sakai. For this release, the maintenance branch is known as the 2.5.x maintenance branch.

Maintenance branches are maintained for at least two-years after the release, longer if there is sufficient community interest and resources. A key feature of the maintenance branch is that it will only contain bug fixes, no new features will be introduced.

We also will be periodically creating maintenance releases (2.5.1, 2.5.2, 2.5.3, ...), based on the maintenance branch, on the order of approximately every one to two months. These releases will include a targeted set of fixes drawn from the maintenance branch, which can be easily QA'ed (this means selecting a subset of the available fixes in the branch so that only a few areas need to be regression tested for each release.) Thus, the QA on these maintenance releases will differ from the QA on a full, major release, such as 2.5.0, in that it will focus only on regression testing areas of change. As a result, the maintenance releases will necessarily lag the maintenance branch in terms of completeness of fixes. The maintenance releases are intended to suit the needs of Sakai deployments for which tracking and incorporating individual advancements in the maintenance branch is not feasible or desired.

For more information, please see:

• 2.5.x Maintenance Branch – specific information on the Sakai Maintenance branch.
• 2.5 Maintenance Releases – specific information on the Sakai 2.5 maintenance releases.
• Release Practice Guidelines – general information on maintenance branches and releases.