Radio Liferay Episode 33: Jari Järvelä, Janne Hietala on Valamis

 About a month ago I had the opportunity to talk to Jari Järvelä and Janne Hietala from Arcusys. They both head Valamis, an E-Learning solution on Liferay that later (end-of-August) won the Liferay App Contest. Unfortunately, a lot of work as well as my summer vacation kept me from releasing this podcast earlier (well, for me it was not quite unfortunate that I had a vacation)

Here are our topics:

• the history of name changes, starting with "JSCORM"
• The meaning and origin of the name
• The release schedule (they met the schedule that we discussed during the recording, released end-of-August)
• Features that have been added throughout the history of the project.
• The version released in August now has a Curriculum Portlet that combines different courses into a Learning Path.
• SCORM, the prevalent standard for exchanging E-Learning information. This standard is typically used as distribution format for commercial courses and Valamis supports SCORM 1.2.
• We talked about Liferay Certification being available "soon" - that was true at the time when we recorded the podcast, it's actually available now
• License, Availability and Price (hint: LGPL, and there's professional support available)
• There's a steady team working full-time on Valamis.
• Design aspects: The Arcusys Team really cares about design aspects, both in the software, as well as in their presentations.
• Geography for beginners, we talk about finish climate, ice-fishing, and "where is Finland"
• If you want to try Valamis without installing it yourself, just try it on their homepage: A demo environment is available
• Picking up my favourite code demo, sevencogs, from my last-year's symposium presentation "Well Hidden Features"
• The experience of publishing on Marketplace, PACL and PACL differences between application servers
• Future Features and Release Plans (e.g. Tin Can API)
• How to evolve from a Learning Management System to a Learning Portal
• The principle of Aiming High
• There's no shortage of standards to implement
• The team is working with a school in Afghanistan to provide what might be the first e-learning system in an afghan school, also connecting them to finnish schools and students.
• Upcoming Symposiums, Portal Solutions Forum, DevCon
• Since we recorded, Valamis won the Liferay Marketplace App Contest

Follow Jari, Janne, RadioLiferay or me on twitter

Again, shoutout and big thank you to Auphonic for postproduction help. This is a fantastic service!

You'll find this episode - and make sure that you don't miss any of the future episodes - by subscribing to  http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadioLiferay. You can also subscribe on itunes.: Just search for "Radio Liferay" or just "Liferay" in the podcast directory.

[Janne Hietala]

Thank youOlaf for professional production. If someone wants to ask any questions regarding the episode or Valamis, I am happy to answer

[Olaf Kock]

Well, any time - it's been a fun production (despite the connection drops that I had to edit out ;) ). Sorry for sitting on it for too long. With what happened during that one month, it's almost worth a new episode...