(Profile, Preferences, Account) UCamp Update

[Ray Davis]

I've always been sorry that Sakai was unable to coordinate Indiana's 
Profile needs with framework development plans. (At the very least, 
supporting "EduPerson" attributes seems like a pretty basic LMS/CLE 
requirement!) Making Profile a pseudo-standalone tool was probably 
the only practical way for the team to deliver it in a timely 
fashion, but for obvious reasons its services and data end up 
bleeding into apparently separate tools (notably Roster). Similarly, 
the functionality described by Vivie is hardly JForum specific, and 
could be useful to many installations who prefer to deploy other 
discussion software.

Trying to figure out a single UI that will meet the vastly varying 
detailed functional requirements of all our target users might be 
overwhelming. But I do believe there's a general need for some 
centrally managed store of person data that's more complex than our 
current "User" module or "Preferences" tool support: behind the UI, 
we need to allow for more efficiently handled properties and we need 
to allow for more contexts (e.g., a course-specific email address for 
instructors, or a project-specific username for language classes). 
While the usability research continues, maybe some of the people 
working on the user kernel services could begin to talk about ways of 
handling this problem. It's possible that with services in place, a 
suite of lighter-weight profile-style applications might be more 
cheaply produced.

Ray

At 08:36 PM 11/16/2007, Vivie Sinou wrote:
...
>We use Jforum's My Profile which our users love
>as it offers just in-time member data and opportunities for users to learn
>about each other and connect while collaborating and communicating in
>discussions.
>
>We eliminated Profile two years ago, as it was confusing to users to have
>two profile tools. Jforum's My Profile is also global, reads Account data,
>and offers great functionality to our users when they need it the most -
>communicating and collaborating. Jforum's My Profile allows participants to
>set preferences, avatars, IM info, interests, etc. We plan on expanding on
>Jforum's My Profile functionality to provide opportunities for networking
>and collaborating, based on profile interests.