New features in Dokeos 1.8.5 - part 1

I've already touched the topic slightly earlier, and there is a nice Dokeos 1.8.5 page in the tabs above that give a global idea, but Dokeos 1.8.5 comes packed with a lot of tiny but practical new features, and tiny but practical improvements. Some of the things we are working on at the moment are listed below

Regional Managers and Human Resources Managers

It's been a repeated complaint among our users that the flexibility of Dokeos roles was not complete enough for medium to large-size companies. Well this should be solved by those two new statuses. Regional Managers will be able to deal with a subset of the administration settings (manage users and courses), while the Human Resources Managers will be able to analyse the reporting globally, of all sessions and all users.

Improved works, forum and blog tools

These three tools have been reviewed to offer better cohesion as a whole and to give more information to the user (alignment of icons that were otherwise moving depending on the item, dates display when has a directory been updated last, ...). The forum and blog tools have been re-added the feature to attach documents, which had been available in Dokeos 1.6 at some point, and then removed because it was unsecure. The security problems have now been taken care of and you will be able to attach your favorite documents, provided they play along with the filtering policies of the Dokeos platform administrator.

User fields

There was a well-hidden feature to add user metadata in a course until now. We've left that one in (although its usefulness could be discussed now) but added a global way of adding data about a user. You can now add a user's country, age, native language or whatever data you would like the users to add about themselves. These data will then be available on request in the survey results and exercises results exports, which will allow you to export more detailed CSV files that will be the key to extended statistics on your users base.

Word documents conversion (Woogie©)

You will now be able to import Word documents directly into a learning path, as an intent to provide you with more possibilities to quick-build the bases of a course. For our hosted clients, this is an additional service though, as it requires considerable server load capacity. The component is totally free and open-source, as usual, so you will be able to download it from our website.

OpenID

You don't really know how easy or practical OpenID can be until you start using it for more than one of your usual applications, but if that's the case, OpenID is a real time-saver and security feat.

Survey without e-mail

You will now be able to take a survey through your course's homepage, without needing an e-mail invitation. That's something we've been asked for quite a lot. That's all for now. In part 2, I will talk about the features we will have but that are not completely finished yet (audio recording, videoconference, LDAP dynamical connectivity and more)

Comments

Hi

The explanation you provide above about regional managers sounds exactly like what is needed to solve a current user community segregation and administration issue that I have.

However I can not find any reference to regional managers in Dokeos 1.8.5. Was this ever implemented?

Good question. The feature was supposed to be developed by Eric Marguin (@dokeos.com) but I don't know what happened in the end with it. It seems indeed that this wasn't developed. Maybe just for one customer...