Moodle - group assignment, Facility and PHP7.X

[agibson]

Hi

 

I don't know if anyone has any suggestions, but here is my quandary:

 

We are currently using Moodle 3.x on an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server, with authentication by LDAP SSO and group assignments done through the Facility to Moodle module. We are using a lot of the PDF annotation for work assignments and assessment by staff using tablets to annotate straight onto the document, and it really is working well...except - we are wanting to move to Ubuntu 16.04 to take advantage of a new feature of Moodle which will allow annotation on any Office document in the same way that the PDF submission works now (this apparently will work on 14.04 but I am yet to get it working). Today I have snapshotted the server and done the upgrade, which to be fair has worked extremely well, but I have found out that Ubuntu 16.04 uses PHP7 and that no longer supports MSSQL. The Facility to Moodle module uses the MSSQL PHP extension to connect to the database (via FreeTDS) to allow us to synchronise users into class groups and therefore make it extremely straight forward to assign courses to the correct students.

 

How do others (who are still using Moodle) do their group assignments? I do feel that the new module for annotating unconverted office documents will save a lot of time, but I do not want this to be at the expense of the time it takes to assign students to class groups. As all students are in many groups, and not taught in forms, it makes this a little more tricky than just adding their ID.

 

I have thought about migrating to a Windows server, however it would mean that we would effectively have to have two separate Moodle servers as we use VPL (Virtual Programming Lab) for Python etc and this is not available for a Windows install.

 

All I really want is to make life easy for staff, students and admins!

 

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

 

Andy

 

PS I don't have any budget available to purchase any synchronisation tools commercially unless they are extremely cheap (sub £100/yr).

[NokiX]

I'm not sure if this any use to you however they look to have released a technical preview for MSSQL support with php 7 on ubuntu 16.04 here: https://github.com/Azure/msphpsql/releases/tag/v4.0.2-Linux

 

Source: https://github.com/Azure/msphpsql/issues/81 (last post on the page)

 

Unfortunately I've not used Moodle with MSSQL myself so sorry I can't be of any further help!

[agibson]

Thank you - I gave it a try but it didn't seem to work. I am guessing the module that Facility to Moodle is looking for within PHP is hardcoded somewhere.

 

Does anyone use any other methods to enrol classes to courses?

[NokiX]

That's a bummer, my other thought would be to possibly look into downgrading or installing another older version of php as it is possible to support multiple php versions. This would get around the missing module issue and there seems to be a few people who have tried this: apache2 - How can I downgrade from PHP 7 to PHP 5.6 on Ubuntu 16.04? - Ask Ubuntu

 

May be worth looking into this type of solution in the short term and then possibly finding other methods to enrol classes later on down the line.

[agibson]

Thank you NokiX, I had tried that too, but it wasn't working either. I have bit the bullet this weekend and rolled back the VM image to how it was pre-upgrade. I have found an updated guide to get the document conversion module working for Moodle so it is happy for now...although when LTS ends for Ubuntu 14.04 I am not sure what I will do...

 

Thanks.

 

Andy