it's learning 3.2 is just around the corner...

Yup, tomorrow is the big day. We're upgrading it's learning to version 3.2. I am sure that feelings are mixed amongst our superusers at the moment; some of you probably remember that our last upgrade took the entire site down for a day and left a few of our customers with performance issues for about a week. Others feel that the timing could have been better - if the upgrade had happened a bit earlier teachers would have been better prepared for the new features.

I am not brave or foolish enough to give my 100% guarantees that the upgrade will be unproblematic. There's still some known minor bugs in the new version of the application and we know from experience that the swarm of it's learning users out there collectively are even better at digging up bugs than our professional testers... But I know this: Never have we spent more resources on preparing for an upgrade, never have we done more performance testing than this time and never have we had more beta-testers submitting feedback to us during our beta period. 2500 users have been involved in beta testing and a whooping 689 posts have been made to the beta-forums! In addition to this we have done significant investments in testing and verification environments over the last few months (VMWare and Dell are sending us love letters) and rewritten our change- and release procedures.

So what's new in it's learning? For this upgrade we've focused on the basics. We have identified some of our most used and popular tools and given them a proper upgrade. There's a new editor coming based on dhtml that is much less troublesome than the existing activex and java editors. The message/email system has had a complete makeover, the same for the discussion tool. More features are added to the mobile application and some useful improvements have been done to the assignment tool. The online help has been completely rewritten and SCORM content has now better support within it's learning. There are also a few changes happening under the bonnet. Some extra layers of security are added and minor performance tweaks are also a part of release.

So come Friday morning all of our customers should have a good impression of how well the upgrade went. Please don't hesitate to share your feedback and thoughts here on my blog!