Microsoft Learning Gateway for MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 released!

The Microsoft Learning Gateway Refresh for MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 is now publically available by downloading it from this site. For in additional information, non-technical discussions, and related resources, please visit https://www.learninggateway.net. For technical discussions and bug reports, please use the Discussions and Issue Tracker tabs on this site.

This refresh is designed to help you leverage your core Microsoft platform skills by delivering a set of web parts that will make SharePoint 2007 immediately relevant to the education and training market. To minimize the amount of time you need to spend configuring components, these web parts have been built to work together, and are accompanied by a new deployment guide designed to simplify deployment. Significant in this release is new information architecture that more clearly supports a diverse set of sites and workspaces, as well as better customization and use of in-built MOSS capabilities such as blogs and wikis.

The following Web Parts are included in this refresh:
•IMS Upload - The IMS Upload web part represents as an import front-end to a basic SharePoint document library. The purpose of this web part is to populate the document library with learning-specific columns defined within the IMS or SCORM-compliant documents’ metadata.
•Meta Search - This web part supports dynamic search prompts based on columns in Content Types, requested by the end user as a search target. It is the partner application to the IMS Upload web part above, i.e. this search web part performs the search on learning objects in a document library populated with metadata using the IMS Upload web part.
•My Classes - This web part is to populate a list of the class sites that the user is a member of. It is based on My Teams web part from MLG 2005 as it provides the required functionality and can be easily configured for other sites other than classes, such as class staff and activity sites.
•My Children - This web part retrieves the logged on parent's children and their pictures based on Active Directory attribute and student relation with school site and provides a filter to other web parts on the page that reflect a parent view of data for a particular student.
•My Planner - My Planner will support the user's personal Exchange mailbox plus user selectable public mail boxes (calendars), SLK events for the current user and SharePoint events for the current user.

Key Features of this Release:
Better MSFT Server Platform Alignment
  Deployment process, templates and application web parts rebuilt for compatibility with MOSS, SharePoint Portal Server 2007 and WSS 3.0.
  Deployment process refined for ISA 2006, SQL 2005 and Exchange 2007.
  Provision to introduce Forms Server as an optional component.
  Introduction of ISA 2006 forms based authentication.
Learner Management
  Introduces SharePoint Learning Kit (SLK) at appropriate points in the information architecture with enhancements to support the parent role.
  Class Server has been retired.
  A new document library based Learning Object Repository has been added with automatic META data extraction and complimentary META based search.
Better leveraging of new MOSS Capabilities
  Introduction of Blogs, Wiki’s and My Sites.
  Better use and strategic placement of Discussions, Surveys and Lists.
  Better use of current and global navigation.
  Improved granularity of audience targeting for documents, list items and news.
Improved Information Architecture
  Introduction of a district or LEA, top-level portal in a multi-school context.
  Unlimited number of member roles, replacing static parent, teacher, student roles.
  Improved cross-role / cross-institution collaboration.