goingon.com

The Engineering Team at GoingOn has months of work lined up for action. Notifications, Syndication, Channels, Twitter & Facebook integration, Inline Help, and a Mobile App are amongst the exciting new projects in our pipeline. Some are ideas in their formative stages while others are elaborately spec’d out documents or moving through development. New functionality comes from research, best practices of the Web, and the needs of our customers as they flow through Client Services and into our R&D process. (More on that another time.)

How should an engineering team prioritize, schedule, and then build out all those exciting new features?  Read Full Article

At GoingOn, I’m in charge of working with our clients on systems integration. Integration means a lot of different things to different people but here I’m referring to connecting existing systems for a seamless experience in navigating from one system to the other. In short this usually means single sign-on or trusted system point integrations. GoingOn supports a variety of single sign-on and trusted system integrations including CAS, Shibboleth, and IMS BLTI (Basic Learning Tools Interoperability). 

I was reading through the National Survey of Student Engagement report (NSSE, or affectionately called “Nessie”) as well as an Inside Higher Ed Article about it which got me thinking: Why do we go to all the effort to deploy SaaS e-learning systems and integrate them with other learning systems within the institution?  Read Full Article

GoingOn is proud to announce the upcoming launch of an exciting new product component, the Personal Commons, slated for release before the end of the year. Students and faculty no longer need to search portals and bulletin boards to discover new resources, learn what people are talking about, or to see what’s going on across the virtual campus. With the Personal Commons, each user can see what is new and important in his or her academic life, all in one personalized place.   Read Full Article

After more than a year of continuous investment in our Drupal 6 platform, the idea of upgrading to Drupal 7 is incredibly daunting. We have custom modules from form behaviors down to the access layer, we have features encapsulating hundreds of exported components, and an aggressive feature release schedule that does not set aside 6 months for a complete rewrite of the codebase just for a new version of Drupal. What to do?

We’ve been playing around with the idea of iterating our Drupal 6 platform toward Drupal 7. By pulling markup, design patterns, APIs, and architecture in Drupal 7 down into platform incrementally, we hope to shorten the final leap that will come when upgrading the entire system.  Read Full Article