Technical Criteria

Please note this is a draft document, and does not reflect the final criteria. If you are a member of this community, feel free to amend as appropriate, but discuss it first.

Open source.

High Priority

The selected tool should be open source, allowing for modifications to be made freely to its source code.

Active development and support community.

Medium Priority

The selected tool must have an active developer and support community to ensure that bugfixes and feature improvements will continue development after adoption by AU.

Hosted on AU servers.

High Priority

It is preferable that the selected tool should be installable on AU-owned server and not be a third-party service to satisfy FOIP regulations.

Platform Requirements

The following platforms should be supported:

Apache-based server (or ability to run on Apache-based server)

High Priority

The selected tool should run on an Apache-based server such as Apache httpd or Apache Tomcat.

AU-supported platform

High Priority

The selected tool should be developed on an AU-supported platform such as PHP, perl or Java using MySQL or PostgreSQL. Preferred platform is LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, or PHP).

Production-ready release

High Priority

Only tools that are in release status will be selected for evaluation. Release Candidates, unless late in their testing cycle, betas and experimental software will not be considered.

Single Sign-On

Medium Priority

The selected tool should support single sign-on through Yale CAS, or be easily modified to do so.

Ease of enhancement/further development

Medium Priority

The tool selected should be developed in a modular fashion, or provide plugin APIs for extending functionality.

Standards-compliant

Low Priority

The tool selected should adhere to, or interoperate with, existing social networking data standards, such as the following:

OpenSocial compatible

Low Priority

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial for more information.

Friend Of A Friend (FOAF)

Low Priority

See http://www.foaf-project.org/ for more information.

Accessible, following WCAG guidelines

High Priority

See http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/ for more information

Spam Control

Medium Priority

The system must provide, through core functionality or readily available plugin, the ability to protect against spam comments. This may take the form of a captcha, a heuristic function, or a third-party service that checks against a blacklist.

General Functional Criteria

Fine-grained user permissions to allow control over content.

High Priority

Fine-grained user permissions give the user the ability to control who is able to view content they have posted to the site. At a minimum, the user should be able to set the following levels of access:

• Private: Only the user can access the content
• Friends Only: Only authenticated users the user has indicated as friends may view the content
• Communities: -ie partciular courses or programs at AU
  
• Public: Anyone accessing the site may view content.

Further levels of access may be defined after the tool is selected.

Permissions on user profile

Medium Priority

The user should be able to control access to his or her profile details.

Permissions on content

Medium Priority

The user should be able to control access to his or her content.

Permissions on contact list

Medium Priority

The user should be able to control access to his or her contact list.

Permissions on notifications

Low Priority

The user should be able to enable and disable notifications from the site.

User Profiles

High Priority

The user should be able to create and share profile data on the site.

Enables optional sharing of content and dialogue with those outside the university

High Priority

The user should be able to share content and dialogue with users external to the university. This should be an opt-in feature.

Contact Lists

High Priority

The tool selected should offer the ability to create and edit contact lists.

Connects users with similar interests

Medium Priority

The user should be able to connect with other users that share interests defined in their profile.

Connects users enrolled in courses together

High Priority

The user should be able to connect with other users enrolled in the same course.

Connects users through other users

High Priority

The user should be able to connect with other users through shared contacts.

Connects users through location

Low Priority

The user should be able to connect with other users through their physical location.

Connects users in the same centre/school

Medium Priority

The user should be able to connect with other users in the same centre/school.

Connects users in different centres

Low Priority

The user should be able to connect with other users in different centres.

User groups

High Priority

The tool selected should offer the ability for users to create both adhoc and official groups. This activity should not be limited to an administrative role.

Blogging

User blogs

Medium Priority

Users should be able to create, edit, and delete posts in individual blogs. These are blogs that only the individual can post content to.

Group blogs

Medium Priority

Users should be able to post to group blogs. These are blogs associated with groups, than anyone with the group can post content to.

Blog comments

Medium Priority

Authenticated users should be able to comment freely on both individual and group blogs.

Ability to apply multiple and/or customizable templates to blogs

Low Priority

Users should be able to modify the appearance of their blog based on supplied templates, or customized stylesheets.

Ability to enable/disable comments for a blog posting.

Medium Priority

The selected tool should give the user the option of enabling or disabling comments on a universal or post-by-post basis. The user should be able to close comments on a blog post after comments have already been made.

Notification of new blog posts

Low Priority

The selected tool should offer the user the option of subscribing to an individual or group blog, and receive notification when new content is posted.

Notification via SMS

Low Priority

It is desirable that the tool allow for notification via SMS messaging.

Ability to moderate blog comments

Medium Priority

The selected tool should give the user the ability to moderate comments posted to their blog from another user. At a minimum, the user should be able to delete comments.

User collaboration (Wiki)

Low Priority

The system should allow students and staff to collaborate on document creation.

Version control of collaborated pages

Low Priority

The system should keep a historical record of all edits made to a collaborative document and provide the ability to return to a previously saved state.

Display online status

Medium Priority

The selected tool should display a list of users who are currently online.

Ability to disable online status

Medium Priority

To protect individual privacy, the selected tool should give the user the option of hiding their online status on the site.

Content Syndication

Medium Priority

The selected tool should allow for content syndication through a modern syndication format such as RSS or Atom.

File sharing

Medium Priority

The selected tool should give the user the ability to upload and share files in the system such as Word Documents, PDF documents, and images.

Podcasting support

Low Priority

The selected tool should give the user the ability to upload and embed audio recordings (podcasts).

Video sharing

Low Priority

The selected tool should give the user the ability to upload and embed videos.

Automatic conversion and replay/streaming of video and audio media

Low Priority

The selected tool should automatically convert video and audio media to web-usable formats.

Photo sharing

Low Priority

The selected tool should give the user the ability to share images with other users of the site.

Support for multiple file upload (ideally through WebDAV or similar)

Low Priority

The selected tool should give the user the ability to upload multiple files at once.

User-generated tagging (Folksonomy)

High Priority

The selected tool should give the user the ability to assign tags to content within the system, such as their profile, file uploads, and blog entries.

Users can tag blog posts

Medium Priority

Users should be able to add multiple tags to their blog posts. These tags should propagate through the system to help other users find similar content.

Users can tag profiles

Low Priority

Users should be able to add multiple tags to their profile data. These tags should propagate through the system to help other users find other users with similar profile tags.

Tags presented as tag clouds

Medium Priority

The selected tool should present the most commonly used tags as a tag cloud. For more information on tag clouds, refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud.

Users can tag media (of any kind)

Low Priority

Users should be able to assign multiple tags to uploaded media, such as photos, videos, and podcasts.

Site search

High Priority

The selected tool should have the ability to search through all site content, including blog posts, tags, and profile data.

ePortfolio Management

Medium Priority

The selected tool should provide the ability to upload and present academic work, collected as an electronic portfolio.

Ability to selectively present blog posts, media, files and arbitrary content in different ways to different audiences

Medium Priority

The selected tool should allow for several content types to be included in the electronic portfolio.

Templates for CVs and other outputs

Low Priority

The selected tool should allow for simple CV creation based on information entered by the user.

Collaborative bookmarking

Low Priority

The selected tool should provide the ability to share bookmarks and site links with other users of the system.

Integration with Moodle

High Priority

The tools should integrate with Moodle, preferably at fine-grained level (e.g. to share blogs from the application within Moodle or to share discussions from Moodle within the application

The selected tool should offer integration with Moodle. This integration should offer:

• A link to the tool from within Moodle
• The ability to migrate content from Moodle into the tool, or
• The ability to link to Moodle content from within the tool.

Integration with existing social tools such as wikis

Low Priority

The tool should offer integration with existing social networking tools.

Integration with existing social networking applications (Facebook, MySpace, etc)

Low Priority

The tool should offer integration with existing social networking applications. For example, the user should be able to migrate existing profile data within Facebook or MySpace into the tool.

Integration with Alfresco

Low Priority

The tool should offer content integration with Alfresco.