Moodle and then some

[Geek_of_HeathMount]

Hi All,
This is my first post, so apologies if it has been covered before.

Two years ago the school opted for a brand new website and a VLE to match. As most of the budget was blown on the website it was left to me to build the VLE using Moodle. The launch for both sites went well, but now we're two years on and we need the "Next Generation" of the VLE. So I'm currently building the new VLE using moodle 1.9.x thus far no real problems.

However, a couple of weeks back the Director of Home Studies ask me to incorporate "e-portfolios". ok i thought and after doing some hunting around I have decided to go with a home grown solution and create a course for each child and have them as teachers for their own course, as all the solutions I looked at were linux based and everything i have is windows !! So here i am coding, integrating, installing to create the new VLE when I'm told that I now have to integrate the SIMS Internet Gateway product which runs on Sharepoint. Ok i thought shouldn't be a problem, until i was told that it has to be up and running by October !!!

Anyway so now i'm in a jam I know nothing about sharepoint or how to integrate the SIMS Internet Gateway. Am I panicking over nothing or are my fears justified? any help or guidance would be well received.

[CyberNerd]

welcome Geek_of_HeathMount

This plugs directly into Moodle to provide portfolios;

Home - mahara.org

You can also use moodle smb web client to go direct to your students home drive to provide a kindof almost eportfolio

Moodle also has pretty good integration with SIMS, and it doesn't require sharepoint
Integrate Moodle, LDAP and SIMS.net - MoodleDocs

as all the solutions I looked at were linux based and everything i have is windows !

don't blame your tools! adapt and learn

[secretlife]

I'm under the impression Mahara doesn't like windows much though?

[wesleyw]

Never had much luck integrating Mahara wth moodle but I think thats our install at fault. There's elgg as well. As for Sharepoint and Sims Learning Gateway thats quite an interesting job Capita will come and install it on your sharepoint server which may take a couple of days. Sharepoint isn't a difficult system to setup it just gets awkward and longwinded if you do things to it I have lol. As for the SIMS to Moodle that's quite straightforward and you can also integrate Moodle into Sharepoint as well I believe.


Wes

[CyberNerd]

I'm under the impression Mahara doesn't like windows much though?

Users may access Mahara with a standard web browser. For hosting solutions, Mahara has been designed for Linux, Apache, PHP and an SQL database, and currently there has been very little testing for Windows hosted environments.

Mahara 1.1 should be installable on Windows, but Mahara 1.0 requires some things that don't ship with Windows. For those people who are adventurous enough to try, it seems that you need to install an equivalent of the 'file' program (see Bug #700), among other things, to make it work.

Instructions for installing using WAMP Server are available for Mahara, which may help you too.

Installing Mahara - Mahara Wiki

seems not. I guess it's all about using the best tools for the job.
I try and take the view that if something can run well on linux then I'll use linux, if I need a paid for OS for a particular application then I'll use one.

[Geek_of_HeathMount]

Thanks for the heads up on mahara.org

I have been playing with LDAP authentication and have managed to get it to work and in June we'll be getting the SIMS AD plug in which, so i'm told, automatically creates AD users and assigns thier AD rights from SIMS.net. This should take care of all account creations etc.

However, after reading the notes in MoodleDocs regarding integration I'm curious to know if it controls access rights to courses too. I currently have this set up to work by year groups, which seems to work well. I just need to know if their is a way of getting that information from AD and into moodle.

[beeswax]

try this link - http://moodle.ulcc.ac.uk/mod/wiki/view.php?id=2674

[Geek_of_HeathMount]

That would certainly improve the profile page, but not quite sure how it would solve my integration woes