The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project team is extremely proud to announce the next major release of the Apereo Open Academic Environment; OAE Falcon, or OAE 7.

OAE Falcon comes with a complete overhaul of the OAE email notification experience, as well as a more complete set of utilities for user and system management.

Changelog

Email Preferences

A frequent request from OAE users is to provide greater control over how often they receive email. OAE Falcon provides the ability for users to specify how often they wish to receive email:

  • Immediately - When selected, users will receive an e-mail immediately after an important activity has taken place. When multiple important activities happen in quick succession, they are aggregated into a single e-mail
  • Daily - When selected, users will receive an e-mail once per day containing all the notifications the user received in the last 24 hours
  • Weekly - When selected, users will receive an e-mail once per week containing all the notifications the user received in the last 7 days

Regardless of the email preference, users can still access their notifications from the OAE user interface in real-time as they occur.

Account Settings Modal Screenshot

 

Email Templates

The e-mail templates have been completely overhauled to provide a gorgeous design inside your inbox. When recent notifications are sent by e-mail, the design will be more consistent with what is seen in the regular OAE user interface as well as take on the branding configuration of your institution.

In addition to being branded to an institution, the e-mail templates are now completely translated using the standard Crowdin translation approach.

All of this greatly simplifies the maintenance of e-mail templates in Apereo OAE.

Single File Share Email 2 Comments Email 2 Emails Some Aggregated

User Management

OAE Falcon provides the ability for global and tenant administrators to perform a variety of maintenance tasks to help support their users, including:

  • "Become" a user, allowing an administrator to browse the tenant on behalf of the user
  • Reset user account passwords
  • Update user profile information and visibility
  • Create new user accounts
  • Search all user accounts in the tenant

Administrative User Search Update User Profile Administrative Become User

System Maintenance

In addition to an enhanced set of tools for managing users, OAE Falcon improves administration for the Global Administrator by providing tools to reindex items in the search index and reprocess content previews based on content and revision filters.

Automated Testing

Support for UI unit tests based on the web browser emulator "PhantomJS" has been added to the automated build process, starting with over 600 unit tests and more to come. These are being added to the existing automated test suite of over 1000 back-end API unit tests, providing even more stability to the release process.

Try it out

OAE Falcon can be experienced on the project's QA server at http://oae.oae-qa0.oaeproject.org. It is worth noting that this server is actively used for testing and will be wiped and redeployed every night.

The source code has been tagged with version numbers 7.0.0 and can be downloaded from the following repositories:

Back-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/tree/7.0.0
Front-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/tree/7.0.0

Documentation on how to install the system can be found at: https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/blob/7.0.0/README.md.

Instruction on how to upgrade an OAE installation from version 6.0 to version 7.0 can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/wiki/OAE-Upgrade-Guide.

The repository containing all deployment scripts can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/puppet-hilary.