ITS plans winter VSpace transition

October 30, 2006 —

A number of significant upgrades and changes to University technology are either in-the-works or under way. Changes include a complete phase-out of the Blackboard learning system, which will be replaced by the Sakai open-source course management system, known at SVSU as VSpace.

According to Information Technology Services Director Ken Schindler, "Blackboard will be done by May of '08." Schindler is confident that, despite the problems that accompany any institutional change, VSpace will prove to be just as, if not more, useful.

"In the long term, we think it will be a more secure product, a more flexible product, and a more robust product," he said.

Vice President for Academic Affairs Donald Bachand recently circulated an internal memo stating, "VSpace has been piloted in some 130 courses on campus, and the reports have been overwhelmingly positive," among other indicators of an impending switch.

As previously reported, Sakai's programming code is open-source, and thus can be developed asynchronously by programmers across the globe. Many major universities have participated in its development, and as Bachand puts it, "[VSpace] has from its beginning been closely aligned with faculty needs."

Students should expect more and more of their classes to utilize VSpace, especially once the winter semester begins and the official transition to Sakai gets underway.

ITS has also continued its work on CardMail, recently finishing its deletion of 90-day-old unopened mail over the course of 11 days, which freed up 13 gigabytes of space, or 7 percent of the student database. Students may notice an increase in performance. Next for CardMail is the deletion of all 365-day-old mail, which probably runs for "about a month," according to Schindler.

"We've got it set so it's throttled," Schindler said. "We very carefully set it up so it won't slow down any student usage."

Schindler says that the database cleanup should noticeably improve the performance of the much-maligned e-mail system.

He added that, "The minute we do that we're going to double the space that students get on CardMail. It's not Gmail, but we're getting more respectable." CardMail users are currently allotted 100 megabytes of storage space, so after the deletion, 200 megabytes should be available.

Schindler mentioned that ITS has received some complaints on the CardMail template, especially concerning the navigability of the interface and the depth of options available to the end-user. Because of this, Schindler has decided that ITS will start encouraging the use of Thunderbird, a cross-platform e-mail and news client from the Mozilla Foundation, creators of the Firefox Web browser.

"We're gonna start pushing Thunderbird as an option for students," he said. They'll be able to contact CardMail, and depending on how you want to manage your settings, you can leave your e-mail on the server, or bring it down to your PC. You'll be able to write rules, and do a little bit better folder management."

Students wishing to do this will need to change some settings of Thunderbird in order to access their CardMail e-mail, but Schindler says some directions will be posted on the ITS support center's Web site in the near future.

Schindler was approving of the program. "If you want a full function client to access CardMail, this is the one. First, it's free and second, it's pretty good. I use it at home, as a matter of fact.”