In the current version of ALOE the group and visibility management have been improved. Still one of three visibility levels can be assigned to a resource (public, group or private). The new feature is that any public resource can be posted to a group. This makes it on the one hand possible to share a resource with members of a certain group and on the other hand the resource is also retrievable for users of the system which are not a member of the according group.

Associating an additional metadata set to a resource in the past required the upload of a file. In ALOE V0.6 such metadata sets can also be associated by referencing a URI. Both kinds of additional metadata sets (files and bookmarks) are displayed on the detail view page of the according resource and can also be accessed from there.

Additionally smaller bugs have been fixed, e.g., the forms in the system can now be navigated easily by using the tab key.

Today we’ve finished the first testing phase of ALOE - thanks a lot to all the beta testers for their engagement and their very helpful comments and feedback!

So, what did we learn in the last days?

• The system was running very stable - we didn’t have a single system crash! Maybe the latest HP update was removing most of the trouble we had before.
• The interface seems to work very fine for firefox, internet explorer, and safari. At least nobody complained
• Encoding ist still causing some trouble. We tried to do as much as possible with Unicode, but sometimes you don’t care…and suddenly notice that the DB on your server is running with ISO-8859-1. Bah…there’s some stuff left to do!
• We need some additional explanations on the pages as well as an FAQ page in the system to which we can refer. E.g., some of our testers complained they didn’t understand the meaning of certain metadata fields.
• The use of an external web page thumbnailer is not a real good solution. Especially when the service you use does no longer deliver any thumbnails We’re now developing our own thumbnailer…
• The group and visibility management will be changed. First of all, every user will have the possibility to share public resources to groups (when he or she is member of the group). And as the owner of a resource, you can chose to restrict the visibility of the resource (as “private” or “for certain groups only”).
• The privacy settings in the user profiles should of course include that you can’t be found in a “member search” when somebody looks for data you’ve decided to hide - sorry for that!

The ALOE team will have some stuff to do in the following weeks!

We’re already online for several weeks now, but there was still a lot of work left that we wanted to finish before we today announced the first (more or less private) beta version of ALOE. In the future, we will tell you some more about our ideas, about where we want to go, how ALOE developed, the people involved, news, bugs, what so ever… Stay tuned!