Surgient Success

We continue to work ever closer with our ASP partners we continue to hone our partnerships seeking improved communications, shared decision making, and involvement in the identificaiton and testing of new features prior to beta release.

What decisions has Surgient made regarding new releases for hosted VTMS customers? Will a preview environment be made available prior to beta releases to enable persons to better understand the implications of pendign upgrades?  How will the 'Voice of the Customer' be captured to ensure the needs of the customer are represented within the product development process?

What lead time will be given for new releases.  Will hosted customers have input into downtimes for upgrades? 

Best, HiEdTechie

Thank you. 

Another question regarding the Saba Centra integration - is Surgient bound by contract to provide feature enhancements and follow Centra's upgrade path?  As you know their is risk in working with multi-party efforts.  What safe guards exist for the customer?

I am also wondering how feature requests are prioritized.  Is this process available or is this done case by case.  i.e. what is the methodology?

 Best, HiEdTechie

Yes, we have committed to maintaining the interface that we delivered the Saba/Centra.  This means that moving forward, their APIs cannot change and must continue to work as designed.

 I do not know how features are prioritized - I think they are based on customer needs from the data marketing collects.  I will have to let someone from our marketing team chime in here.

 Jackie.

Just a follow up - or two:

What is the frequency of service packs and new releases?

Is the also a history of hotfixes in between service packs?  I am asking so as to develop an understanding as to the QA methodology.

Best, HiEdTechie

Surgient says there isn't really a schedule of Service Packs. Surgient works on maintenance issues as they are identified by customers.  When a bundle of fixes passes through QA, and based on need, they release an update.  Thanks Richard from Surgient for the Answer. 

Hi EdTechie,

What stage are you at in incorporating Centra\Saba with Surgient?  It is a project we have tabbed for possible use.  We currently run Centra on dedicated hardware, but want to provide a virtual learning lab add on with Centra.  Have you set this up or are you still in the planning stage.  I would be interested in your efforts.  We have currently setup Surgient VQMS for our virutal QA lab environments and am impressed with the capabilities but also would like to look at VTMS.  Thanks for your experience.

Klaus

Awesome work, Klaus - I love watching customers helping customers!

 I will just add that we try to minimize the number of hotfixes that are done.  These are generally done for a critical issue that must be fixed pretty quickly (and before a service pack can be tested and approved for release).  A need for a hotfix is evaluated on a case by case basis, and services or support is always involved in the application of the hotfix.

Jackie.

That is something I would like to see, is a posting of some sort of all your Surgient VQMS customers and the type of environment they have setup, such as the virtual platform (MSVS, VMWare) they are running on, the infastructure of thier VQMS environment (firewall, VLANs, mainframe integration (yes we have added mainframes and large data servers to the mix)..., the types of deployments being done (multi tier applications, servers, workstations, infastructure servers...), the size of thier environments and so forth to be able to contact like companies with best practice questions, issue resolution and such.  Thanks

Klaus

Jackie,

Our system is a little unique.  We have an LMS front end to Centra that the end users access for thier Centra classes.  The LMS we use is called ViewPoint.  When we start looking at providing virtual classrooms with the Centra classes, will a third party LMS front end work with Surgient VTMS, in our case ViewPoint?  Thanks

Klaus

Klaus, Great idea!

Centra ver. 7.6 will be released by Saba in the Dec/ Jan timeframe and we first need to have that installed prior to evaluating Surgient in house. But I am holding out for access to a demo server. ;o)

It sounds like you have Centra installed on site and have some control over the upgrade path.  What are your plans re: Centra ver. 7.6 - will you install once released or wait and see?  Either way, it would be absolutly terrific to network with you moving forward.

I see now that VQMS is also useful for testing images; I have some experience managing the imaging process for about 800 workstations using 200 software titles.  Guess I need to read those threads as well.  But first - are you using VQMS for image testing for for specific applications?

Best, HiEdTechie

ViewPoint isn't one that we have integrated with to date, but I do not see that being a hindrance as long as they have the ability to make external API calls. I couldn't find anything on ViewPoint in my simple Google search to see if they tout anything about integration on their web site, but I think most LMS vendors these days realize the need for it.

However, if you're using Centra for classes, it almost seems that you might use your LMS to do the Centra stuff and allow Centra to then do the Surgient stuff? Or is that too many levels of indirection? I would have to more fully understand your environment and what you do now versus what you'd like to do before I can talk about this with any level of intelligence (and then I hope I can :-) ).

Thanks,

Jackie.

Jackie, I think I follow. 

Use Centra as the basis for the live sessions and access the virtual labs through the established interface (pending release of 7.6). 

<Thinking out loud>  Yes, this would be useful and actually seems to be necessary ao as to foster coimmunication (VOIP, etc) between the instructor and the students.

But what about independent study?  Optimally there would be  away to bypass Centra and authenticate straight through Blackboard into the virtual labs.  As we discussed previously, we aim to use our Oracle portal for all authentication and then Blackboard for all course materials, including links to the Centra Live sessions (and perhaps Surgient Virtual labs).  As I read the manual end users would access the labs via a single link.  Is this link specific to the user or is there a single generic link for all persons for a given lab space/ time?

Best, HiEdTechie

The link is specific to a user session and an API would be required to fetch that particular link.  I recently did a customization that allowed for a generic link for all students that then assigned the link to a user as he clicked it.  In this scenario, the customer knew he would have a class of say, 10 users.  However, because those 10 users could change right up until class time, he doesn't really want to assign them sessions in Surgient.  At class time, a generic link would become available for all the students, and as they passed thru to the Surgient system, the session would be converted into a specific session for each user.  If the LMS did something funky and an 11th user showed up and tried to click the link, there would be no sessions left and he would be rejected.

Thanks,

Jackie.

 We are ever striving for smaller class sizes; but classes seem to average around 18-22 students.  Obvisously teaching in a virtualized environemtn introduces an entirely new paradigm om terms of best practices.  Do guidelines exist that details optimal class sizes?  If not that may well prove to be a useful bit of information.  That is, is teaching via  virtualized environment take the same amount of time as an in-room experience.

Best, HiEdTechie