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In order to support the beginning of a new school year Digitalbrain have made a number of improvements to our course and assignment functionality:

• Assignments can now be given a release date, until which time they are hidden from students on a course
• Additional details now provided when when exporting mark book from a course
• Administrators can now view mark books even if they are not teachers on a course

In addition to these new features release 1.6 also contains code to support the completion of account migration to the new webmail system as well as the following resolutions to known issues:

• Assignment end time no longer showing one hour out on the course homepage calendar
• Formatting fixed in student mark book
• When viewing as the student the colour of the inactive tabs in the assignment editor is now correct
• Courses no longer default to “not started” when they are being use

As part of Digitalbrain’s continuing program of improvement we are pleased to announce Site Release 1.5 will go live on Wednesday 1st August subject to passing QA and testing. This release contains improvement in two key areas:

• New Discussion Forums
• New Adaptamations and Adaptamation Viewer

Forums

The new Forum application has been developed to replace the existing mail discussion functionality within Digitalbrain. Re-designed from the ground up, Forums bring with them massive improvements in terms of look and usability. Developed using our Portlet technology this new application meets and exceeds all current BECTA requirements for a discussion forum within a Learning Platforms.

Adaptamations

When looking for adaptamations to insert into Learning Module pages an new thumbnail browser will be displayed. Dividing the Adaptamations into types the browser will display a thumbnail image coupled with a description of how that Adaptamation works.

To accompany the new browse and insertion process we will be including three new Adaptamations. These new Adaptamations include an image gallery that can pull through image collections from the web site Flikr or from a folder within a Digitalbrain portal.

Further details and updated help files will be available on our updates and help portals at http://updates.digitalbrain.com & http://help.digitalbrain.com respectively, as well as tips on how to make the most of these new features.

On 1st June Digitalbrain will migrate all Shropshire webmail clients on to the new service.  A pdf containing the key features can be downloaded from here, the new features include:

• New look and feel
• New editor
• Email archive option
• Drag and drop functionality
• Right click menus
• Searchable address book

If you have any queries or questions contact Keith Havercroft.

If you use the Shropshire Primary adaptamation as your digitalbrain home page, you may have noticed that it has been affected by the db upgrade and no longer works (you can make the changes, but can’t save them). Digitalbrain are aware of this and are trying to solve the problem. We will let you know the solution as soon as we find out.

Digitalbrain are pleased to announce the launch of site release 1.4 in two parts over Thursday 10th May and Friday 11th May. This release constitutes the largest single release of functionality on Digitalbrain since the java code conversion that took place last August. To this end the release had been divided into two parts. These break down as follows:

For release tonight - Thursday 10th May:

- New icons within the calendar (see screen shot above)

- Replacement ‘More options’ icon in webmail (in line with new calendar icons)

- Replacement calendar on Contemporary homepage (in line with new calendar icons)

For release tomorrow - Friday 11th May

 

- New text editor throughout the site  (see screen shot above)

- New folder listing

- New icon view of folder listing

- Replacement calendar icon in folder listing (in line with new calendar icons)

- New search features in account administration screen

Further details and updated help files will be available on our updates portal at http://updates.digitalbrain.com as well as tip on how to make the most of these new features.

Most primary schools in Shropshire use the Shropshire adaptamation for their db front page. The new text editor that was released last week means that you need to go about editing it in a different way. When you log on and click on your blue pencil, you will no longer see the ‘edit flash’ button. What you need to do is click on the adaptamation box on your screen - it has this symbol in it

This selects the adaptamation. You can then click on the adaptamation button on the toolbar  , which brings up the familiar editing wizard.                                    

Digitalbrain are pleased to announce that the new homepage and modernised icons have been released.

Contemporary Homepage
This new page frame has been created as a companion to the new calendar and e-mail functionality and it brings the same modern look and feel of these applications to individual users’ homepages. This page contains a number of features above and beyond the current personal homepage. These are: the ability to pull-through a news feed from your school or an RSS feed from your favourite site, a customisable short cuts section and scroll bars for the calendar and discussion pull-through.

All the content you currently have in your homepage will be retained when you move over to the new homepage, so don’t worry about having to start your page from scratch.  Please see here <http://updates.digitalbrain.com/help/helpfiles/Activating%20the%20new%20homepage.pdf>  to view a guide to activating your new homepage. You may find the new features of this homepage look even better in a full width portal, you can try this out by selecting “variable width” from the “view” menu.

Modernised Icon Set
In line with the enhancements to the homepage and calendar we have released a new icon set for all pages, listings and toolbars throughout the portal. These new icons are an evolution of the ones you will be familiar with but if you want to see a like-for-like replacement list for all icons this can be found on our updates site. <http://updates.digitalbrain.com/updates/icons/index.htm>

One important change to note is the replacement of the yellow ’smiley face’, as this has been changed for accounts, homepages and group memberships. You will now find accounts and the ‘my homepage’ link represented by a yellow ‘person’. Group memberships will be represented by the same icon but in green.
We hope that you like these new additions to the site and welcome any feedback you have on them.

If you have any questions or queries regarding this release, or any other matter relating to Learning Manager, please do not hesitate to contact the Digitalbrain Customer Support Team. You can also check updates.digitalbrain.com <http://updates.digitalbrain.com/>  where regular updates are posted.

Digitalbrain are pleased to announce the forthcoming release of new calendar functionality over the weekend beginning Friday 6th October.

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Digitalbrain are pleased to  advise that site release 1.1.0 was released on Friday 29th  September this maintenance release has resolved the  issues noted below and enabled a variety of enhanced features to be  launched.
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Digitalbrain’s major platform update to Java based code is near to completion; the new Calendar and Webmail applications are finished and currently in Quality Assurance. Users will be migrated to the new services from the old Calendar and Webmail applications as follows:

Calendar Migration

Migration to the new Calendar is envisaged to begin week beginning the 28th of August and will last for approximately ten days. All users will be migrated during this time as this is not expected to be an extensive task.

Email and Contacts Migration

There are over 20 million email and 4 million contacts to be migrated, therefore the migration to new email is an extensive process. The new email and contact or ‘shared address book’ applications are currently undergoing final QA with a target release date of the week beginning 28th of August. This migration will take the form of two phases:

1. The migration of users who have logged into the portal over the last 180 days (active users). This process is expected to take up to four weeks (depending on portal usage).

2. The remainder of currently inactive users will be migrated upon log-on. The process for each account is expected to only take 10 seconds on average. Email will be unavailable during this time, although all other portal services will remain unaffected.

It is difficult to predict a precise timetable of users/LAs within the five week period, as the time taken will be determined by the size of individual email accounts. However, in order to alleviate any uncertainty, Digitalbrain will communicate progress as follows:

1. Each day during the migration period Digitalbrain will update progress against target on updates.digitalbrain.com. Updates will begin from the 29th of August.

2. Digitalbrain will prioritise migration of all top level accounts first, giving a showcase for each LA /school, for training and communication purposes .

3. In addition to the above, any admin users will also be prioritised. The training material for the new features will be distributed to LAs and be available at help.digitalbrain.com/help/helpfiles/ prior to migration.

Please note that the dates above are subject to final QA and any changes to these will be communicated on updates.digitalbrain.com/