Hi everyone,

We have been getting some great feedback on our project over the past two months.  We have been seeing folks go into the code, understand it, and offer suggestions and bug fixes.  We have even heard of some of you localizing the plug-in for your locales – which is a testament to Moodle’s powerful and simple localization techniques. 

This has been an important step for us as a team, because it validates our vision of community involvement in the work we are doing.  So, thanks to all of you for digging in and giving us all the great input.

With this great feedback, we have been working hard on a few areas, and we now have a new release of Microsoft Live Services Plug-in for Moodle.  We call this “the December release.”

One of our major goals in this release is to improve performance and thus provide a better user experience.  We were fortunate to have some Microsoft customers who tested the plug-in and reported that, in a configuration with a large number of users, our code was slowing page load time down significantly.  So we did some performance analysis (which can be tricky in PHP) and we believe it is now properly addressed. Thanks to the University of Chichester for providing their valuable opinion and actually helping test the plug-in for us in their environment.

Highlights in this release:

1.       Improved performance. The initial list of Outlook message and calendar items are pulled through an asynchronous (a.k.a. AJAX) call, which unblocks page loading. The contact names are cached on demand. This eliminates the persistent “Loading contacts” message.

2.       The plug-in works with a proxy now. Previously we did not use proxy setting to make curl calls. Thanks to Ashley Holman for helping us with this issue and providing the patch!

3.       Fixed bug which crashes Cron script if Show Alert option is not being selected (Ashley Holman fixed this one too!)

4.       Better error detection when trying to use the Alert API.

5.       New getting started guide. The new getting started guide is more informative and easier to follow.

Known Issues:

1.       Special characters “åäö” in new mail or new event result in a failed EWS call.

2.       When creating a new Calendar item (an event), the plug-in doesn’t allow the start time to be earlier than the system time. But it currently is disregarding the difference between system time zone and the time zone in the Moodle user time zone. It is not an issue if the user’s Operating System time zone matches the Moodle time zone setting which we think is still the majority of use cases.

3.       “System unavailable” message in Calendar section.  We do not think this is a bug in the plug-in. It is possibly an issue with the Exchange Web Services, or the way we are using it.  The symptom is that for some users they cannot use “SortOrder” to sort Calendar events. A workaround is to comment out the SortOrder tag in ews.php.  We will continue to investigate this issue.

Please go to Microsoft Live Services Plug-in for Moodle project page then click “TRY IT” to download the update. To install the update just unzip it and replace old files. To do a fresh install, please refer to getting started guide.

As always we are open to your comments, problem reports, and suggestions.  Either post to the forums or feel free to send email to us on “moodle at microsoft dot com”.

Happy Holidays!