Process and timeline update:

Greetings,
As many of you may have questions or comments or even suggestions about this tool, I would like to post a general update on the rough timeline that we will be operating with. As you could likely tell by the title of this subproject we do NOT anticipate that this tool will be completed before the 2.1 release date. Given that currently the code freeze date for that release is in October and release in November, we would have to deliver such a stripped down release that it would likely not serve users well at all.

The requirements as they exist now have gone through numerous rounds of review and refinement and as we all know, that can be an ongoing and never ending process. We had to pick a set of requirements at some point and move forward with those and the document attached represents just that. Development on this tool has already started and we anticipate that it will be available for download from CVS head around the first of the new year. Likely not a part of the 2.1 Sakai release, it will likely be included in the next official Sakai release beyond 2.1.

I have already received a few suggestions and recommendations on the tool and would request that if you have any comments like that you post them directly to the site for all to see and not directly to me. Although we will likely not be able to incorporate new features into this version, we may be able to refine the requirements based on community input depending on the complexity of the refinement.

We look forward to the comments, suggestions and thoughts of the community as we try to improve this tool and provide it back to the Sakai community. Thanks.

I'm a little curious: with so many open source forum and message tools out there, why was it decided that creating a new Sakai tool from scratch would be the best way to go? What were the missing requirements?

Rob, is there anything digital and interactive one can look at for Message Forums? For example, are the designs shown in the requirements/specification document done in OmniGraffle or a similar program that could be made into a prototype suitable for user testing? Thanks!

Update:

Development for the Message Forums tool is currently underway. We are planning to have a version of the tool available for testing by December 12th. IU will be implementing this tool in our production release on December 29th.

As an aside, recent usability testing showed us that the name of the tool, Message Forums is not consistent with user expectations, so we have decided to rename the tool 'Message Center'. Changes to the design specs, resulting from this testing and information with regard to the requirements which were fulfilled with this release will be available soon. I will be posting this information to this site once it is available. Thanks.

User Experience Testing:

I just posted in the attachements area the report on the user experience testing conducted at IU on the new Message Forums (now Message Center) design.

Is there an up-to-date roadmap and timeline for releases? I scanned through the various collab lists but couldn't find this info.

The UI updates in Forumsv1.pdf look great!

A couple questions:

1. What Sakai release are these updates targeted for?
2. Any ETA on allowing anonymous posts?

Three cheers for the option to split the tools. The mock-ups look sharp. A couple of thoughts about TS-1.1:

1-- I understand the advantage of radio buttons (instead of an opt in checkbox) for yes/no Topic Settings, but I'm wondering about the choices. Maybe it's just the double-negative that keeps tripping me up on this one: adding "disable" to the prompt seems to add a level of complexity (no, don't disable). Instead of "Lock Forum (Disable...)," what about a setting called something like "New Posts" and options like these:

(o) Active topic, allow new posts
(o) Locked topic, no new posts

Radio lists seem to work this way in other tools. You don't necessarily need the name of the setting to know what you're agreeing to. You can visually scan down the center of the form and get a snapshot of the whole collection of settings.

The second setting might be "Moderator"

(o) Open topic, no moderator(s)
(o) Moderated topic, moderator approval required for new posts

And the last radio list perhaps "Revise"

(o) No revisions
(o) Revise own
(o) Revise any

2-- Can the two columns of permission level permissions be moved over to the right? It's the only place on the page where you take action out there in the first column. I've seen users confused by this. They think that the first column is somehow related to "Permission Level" in some special way and that the second column is somehow separately related to the dropdown menu.

3-- I see in the notes that changing the moderator settings for a forum doesn't effect existing topics in that forum. Is that also true of freezing? Seems like the Forum Settings page should alert users that these settings don't cascade. I suspect that at least half of the folks would expect the setting to apply to existing topics within the forum.

Keep up the great work!