More about Saba Learning Version 6.0 - First Look

Continuing from the last exciting blog entry, some more details about the forthcoming 2009 release of Saba Learning 6.0.

(The photo has nothing to do with the new release but I thought I'd throw it in anyway: Learning Technology Team members. Liam Foley, Chris Fioretti and John Talanca as the Global saba Conference 2008)

In the next version of Saba, all sections will have an RSS button and so jumping on the trend to stream out alerts to an RSS reader in another application. Great idea. The downside. Can you bring in feeds? You can stream out...but not in. Can the LMS be an RSS reader No. Saba did not consider this. Sad but true. But they realize the mistake. Saba only thought about notifications in this regard. But no-ones perfect, right? Other changes. All pages are based on plain old HTML and so easy to modify – great news which means our wonderful look and feel will be real easy to implement. How did they do this? The presentation layer is separate from the application layer.

They (not us just yet) have made the Centra experience more seamless. You can launch, edit or join directly from My Events. Search has also been revamped and improved (they promise). You can browse by location, by language, competencies, shows also most frequently used, see whats coming up in next 3 mths, etc. (not sure all this is really new but the search engine has been fully serviced they say). So lots of changes based on a sound usability study. Thats good news. One note about about the Admin interface. This won't be re-surfaced just yet. You see the tab for Admin but it leads to the old interface. It will be redone but later. They focused more on the user experience as a first shot.

The tabs contain Portlets within Portlets...that can be made available easily in SharePoint or other Portals sharing the same protocols for portlet mobility.

There is an edit page layout button and admins can anchor portlets like Search so users know where it always is.

Other improvements worth a mention: elimination of annoying pop-ups, add multiple keywords function, improved enrollments - with a facelift, support for back button on browser, pop up dialogue boxes with mouse over (nice), profiles now have photos and you can do drag and drop portlet re-ordering. We will consider putting this tasty upgrade the Roadmap next year and at least get a demo version installed internally so we can play around in it. I can't wait.