October through December 2008
MIT's Thalia focused on preparing for the community release, with particular attention paid to making the functionalities and features within the application more self-serve for users. The development team made several settings editable through the Manage Domain area, a metadata wizard, and the ability to change an item's owner. There is also support for Unicode so that items may be tagged with foreign characters.
On the backend, several steps were taken to make the Thalia application easier to support, namely enhanced monitoring tools, simplified backup and restoring, and scripts to make installation easier. Thalia is also now integrated with MIT's Touchstone single sign on service for authentication. It also allows users to specify Moira groups to share items.
The team has finalized the terms of service for users and is in the process of finalizing support arrangements with training and the helpdesk.
Stellar 2.2.1 is slated for release in January 2009 for the Spring semester. A new interface for the survey tool, meant to improve usability and provide cleaner integration into the Stellar user experience, was released to the Sloan pilot users on December 20th. Spring 2009 features include spreadsheet upload and role-based access to the Gradebook, a new drag and drop Materials interface, which had been postponed from the previous release, and textbook information listing required and recommended books and their ISBN numbers for courses in the CourseGuide.
Peak usage broke another record on October 15, 2008 with 1091 concurrent Stellar users. Averages over the quarter amounted to about 400 users. Stellar is currently hosting 25 IAP 2009 sites (most of these are in the PE department) and 319 Spring 2009 sites.
The MIT Wiki Service was hosting a total of 1094 wiki spaces at the end of Q2, up from 952 in Q1 2009. Of these, 145 were newly provisioned and comprised 43 class related (i.e. linked to Stellar class sites) and 102 non-class related spaces. The Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments led with the highest number of departmental users (at 382) while IS&T remains the most avid departmental user of the wiki service, with the highest number of logins (20685).
July through September 2008
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