Richard Willis

I’ve finally released SLK 1.4 to Beta. Sorry about the delay, but in the end I’ve rewritten the drop box functionality to hopefully work seamlessly within SharePoint. To do this I knew I needed to make changes to how the drop box library was created which would be incompatible and so decided to hold back on officially releasing it.

You can download from the release page on CodePlex.

It is not backwards compatible with the version uploaded to the patches folder, so any documents returned by that will not be available via this version. The documents will still be present though.

The major changes compared to the version in the patches folder are:

1. Students can open office documents and save them straight back to SharePoint without having to save to disk first.
2. Teachers can open and comment on office documents without having to save to disk first.
3. The drop box library is created as required. You do not have to enable the SLK feature on the site to create it.
4. Although folders are still used as containers to hold student’s work (as the document names are likely to be the same), they are not used to navigate the assignments. You either use the default view which is grouped by assignment or use assignment specific views which are created when an assignment is created.
5. You can use the drop box in a locale which doesn’t use US style dates.
6. I’ve currently removed the download all and upload all files options for teachers so that I can get the release out. I just haven’t had time to complete this.
7. I’ve removed Course Manager from the install. This will again be available as a separate release. The reason is that the quality is still not there for it to be bundled.

I will consider this version to be in beta until 24 Jan at the latest. At which point there will be another beta version with at a minimum the download all and upload all functionality in, or a final release. Please download and report any bugs, which I will attempt to resolve quickly. I am keen to get 1.4 RTM so we can move on to the next version and get the project moving again.

Note, I still need to update the documentation to cover this release, this may take some time. If anyone would like to volunteer to do this it would be really helpful. I’m also considering moving it to the wiki pages on CodePlex rather than just having the getting started pdf as it will be easier to maintain and distribute. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?