Sakai OAE Deployment and Management

Chapter 3. A Whirlwind Tour

OAE doesn’t come with a user manual any more than Facebook, Google+, Orkut, or RenRen do. The user interface for the students, faculty, and researchers is designed to be straightforward after a bit of poking around. Local communities are left to develop their own customs without direction from the software creators.

This whirlwind tour exposes you to the key areas around profiles, courses, permissions, and content before sending you to the backend to customize them. If you’d prefer to click around and discover the system for yourself, by all means do so, then head to Building from Source to start changing things up.

Choose Your Browser

OAE is designed to be browser agnostic, supporting as many browsers as possible, degrading gracefully when it runs in an unfamiliar browser. Testing targets the two most recent versions of Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Apple Safari at the time of a release. For OAE 1.2, released on April 25, 2012, this means:

• Mozilla Firefox 11 and 12

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and 9

• Google Chrome 17 and 18

• Apple Safari 4 and 5

Create Your First Account

Whether you’re working with the Web Start version, downloaded the binary, or decided to get down with Maven builds before looking around, let’s get you in the system now.

You’ll see a link at the top of your browser to Sign Up. This takes you to http://localhost:8080/register where you can set up your account (see Figure 3-1). The demonstration text is a tribute ...