Ed Bilodeau

This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

# Benefit of system integration on campus :

At many institutions, there is little to no integration between an administrative system, like SCT Banner, and a learning management system, like WebCT. This lack of integration requires faculty to perform duplicate administrative tasks in both systems. To address this issue, we implemented the SCT Luminis Data Integration for e-Learning solution. This solution provides real-time, standards-based data integration between learning management systems and SunGard SCT administrative systems. The integration simplifies administrative tasks for faculty and reduces data entry redundancies.

We've had this kind of integration (Banner/WebCT) at McGill for a few years now. It does make things a lot easier for everyone involved.

No portal integration yet, however, but the selection of Oracle's portal software was only made recently. No word at all on timelines, features, etc. Nor am I holding my breath. Besides, I expect most people will be more focused on making use of the new functionality provided by WebCT Vista, which will start to roll out in the fall. From what I can tell, the portal is fairly low on most people's priority list.

Comments:

Judging by the amount of time it took the University to replace its portal product manager and then select a product, I tend to agree: the Oracle portal product is a low priority item.

However, this is a system we hope will, theoretically, tie everything together, including courseware.

Moreover, this is a system we hope will accommodate future systems, such as doucument management, image banks, and, an institutional repository.

Clearly, there's a need to talk more about the campus-wide portal product, because it will shake up McGill's systems landscape.

# posted by

David Kemper : 10:16 PM