Update From The Fall 2015 Karuta Meeting In Montréal

Members of the project team for the Karuta Open Source Portfolio met at HEC Montréal in Montréal, Canada, September 28 to October 1, 2015. At our meeting we worked with our Apereo mentors, Ian Dolphin and Jaeques Koeman, to finalize progress toward graduating from Apereo incubation. We also increased the visibility of Karuta in the French-speaking world through a presentation by Jacques Raynauld and Eric Giraudin at the “Higher Education in the Era of Open Source: Sharing the Experiences of France and Quebec Internationally” conference that took place in Montréal on Friday, October 2.
 
The most significant work to take place in our four-day work session is the development of a new user interface for Karuta to replace the software’s plain vanilla look and feel. The new interface is already in testing and will be added to an upcoming release of Karuta 2.0 targeted for February 2016. A highlight of the new interface is the ability of institutions to easily add their own banner and institutional colors to Karuta pages.
 
Developers at the meeting did an extensive code review along with additional performance testing. Given ample server memory and a sufficient number of processors, when there are at least two seconds between different Karuta log-ins and/or users opening portfolios, the performance of Karuta is excellent.
 
Functional team members at the meeting worked on new terminology to differentiate Karuta portfolios from rubrics, portfolio components, dashboards, reports, and batch files. In addition, a simple use case with an accompanying workbook is being designed for the admin welcome page in order to provide direction to new Karuta designers. The functional team also d