Zia Consulting, Inc

It’s September – the time when school buses start and college towns spring back to life.  It is also the month we wrap up a project with Athabasca University (AU), Canada’s leading open university with over 38,000 students and 1200 faculty and staff members.

Like so many companies, Athabasca had developed a level of internal expertise using Alfresco but needed help taking it to the next level.  This is not unusual as many organizations implement an ECM solution to serve as a basic repository for content but over time want to include workflow, automate business processes or integrate it with other technologies.

When AU approached us at an Alfresco Meet Up last year, we recommended conducting a detailed roadmap assessment. This assessment is an invaluable part as it examines not only the technology infrastructure but we also worked with AU over a six week period to clearly define business objectives, workflow requirements and record management needs.

The assessment identified three main projects – upgrading to Alfresco 3.3; designing a long term records management strategy and building workflows.  By breaking down the project into these phases, we were able to quickly hit the ground running and set up and test the new Alfresco environment as well as integrate it with Moodle.  AU now uses a custom folder and taxonomy structure within Alfresco to help serve as the records management foundation.  Most importantly, we helped to train AU’s IT team on building custom Alfresco workflows so that they can leverage internal resources to build additional workflow capabilities into Alfresco.

By spending so much time on the initial roadmap assessment, we were able to work with AU to define key priorities and set them up for future success with Alfresco.

Read the full case study to see how AU is using Alfresco with Moodle to store and manage all its course content.

Zia is currently helping an online university automate its business processes using Alfresco.  Currently, a small portion of the school’s content is managed in Alfresco.  The bulk of the content (quizzes, assignments, etc.) is stored in Moodle, unmanaged.

Zia has built web services for the 1.9.x Moodle servers that allow Alfresco’s automated workflows to backup/restore a Moodle course and to grant/deny access to a Moodle course for a particular user.

Moodle 2.0 provides some out-of-the-box Alfresco integration, but no services like the ones outlined above.  There is, however, greatly improved web service support with Moodle 2.0.

Zia’s extensions to Moodle allow their client to implement the following business process:

1. A professor, using the Alfresco user interface, requests to make a change to a course.
2. Alfresco (by calling a web service) grants the professor write access to a development copy of the Moodle course.
3. The professor makes the desired changes in Moodle, and then goes into Alfresco to submit the changes to the editorial team (by marking the workflow task assigned to him as complete).
4. Alfresco then removes the professor’s access to the development Moodle course, to prevent him/her from making changes during the review process.  An automated workflow step pulls the content from the development Moodle instance and the production Moodle instance and compares the two.  The document that summarizes the changes is attached to the workflow.  A workflow task is assigned to the editorial team to review the changes.
5. A member of the editorial team then approves or rejects the change.  If the change is approved, an automated workflow step backs up the production Moodle course and checks it into Alfresco.  Then the development Moodle is backed up and restored into production.

This automation provides several key advantages to the university:

1. Improved turnaround time.  The automated process is much faster.
2. Reduced error rate.  The system won’t forget a step, or accidentally modify the wrong course.
3. Improved editorial control.  The editors don’t have take the professors‘ word for what changed; the system shows them the changes.
4. Revision control of course content.  The school now has a revision history of the changes to the course, and can “roll back” to a previous version if necessary.

Please conatct us if you’re interested in learning more about Moodle integration with Alfresco.

Related articles

• Accessing Home Directory via Moodle (edugeek.net)