Community Meeting re: Office integrations

Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Damyon Wiese -
Number of replies: 31

Hi all,


Having looked at what the community has done for Google Apps, and Office 365 - we have been doing some brainstorming in HQ about a core implementation.


We have some ideas we would like to discuss so are holding an open meeting for the community to attend this Wednesday. Its very hard to select one time that suits everyone so hopefully this will cover most.


We will be using ZOOM for the discussion, which works on all devices.


Date:  Jan 25, 2017 4:00 PM GMT


This is at 8am PST, 11am EST, 4pm GMT, and midnight in Perth


You can join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://zoom.us/j/604102893


We look forward to seeing you there.


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In reply to Damyon Wiese

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Frederic Nevers -

Hi Damyon, 

The early specs look really good. How certain is it that this will be developed for 3.3?

Cheers, 

Fred

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In reply to Damyon Wiese

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Damyon Wiese -

Just confirming - the requirements for this project and some info on the implementation is listed in this document: 

https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Better_Office_Integrations_3.3

This has been updated based on the feedback we got from the community meeting - thanks to all who attended. 

We will be starting work on this project soon.

If anyone has feedback or questions - please reply to this thread.

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In reply to Damyon Wiese

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Brendan Heywood -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Some extra REQs / comments:

REQ 2: This spec seems to very heavily lean on plain OAuth which I'd question a little bit given that it's only an access protocol and not an identity protocol. It would be better to use the superset protocol OIDC instead.

REQ 4: I'd add the extra requirement that an admin should be able to set this up so a student doesn't need to approve the connection. This is mostly external to moodle, but it's critical to the user experience so needs to be possible and documented.

REQ 6: As above, if the admin has auto-approved this across a domain you shouldn't be able to manage this (or even see this?).

REQ 11: Please not google search, it should be deterministic and not require internet. eg it could detect strings from lorem ipsum. This should be coverable by behat.


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In reply to Damyon Wiese

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Michael Aherne -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Can you clarify point 3 in REQ 2 please? From my interpretation of it you'd have this situation: a student who has an existing Moodle account provided by the university clicks on "login with Office 365", authenticates successfully and - as Moodle can't match these OAuth details to an existing account - gets a new Moodle account.

In that case, I'd expect the student to be given the option to log in to their existing account and link the OAuth details to it.

I guess it depends on the meaning of "matching" in this context, and I may well be misinterpreting that as some kind of automated thing, so some clarification would be useful.

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In reply to Damyon Wiese

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Frederic Nevers -

Hi, 

I may have missed it but I could not find anything in the specs about grading/annotating files stored in the office suite (e.g. G Suite or Office 365). Will there be provision for documents to be marked using the Moodle grading interface? This would be most useful for organisations that use advanced grading methods, such as rubrics or advanced grading for example. 

Cheers, 

Fred 

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In reply to Frederic Nevers

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Jason Hardin -

Based on the townhall the goal was to have a minimum viable product integration. I think grading while nice was not considered MVP.

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In reply to Jason Hardin

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Frederic Nevers -

Hi Jason, 

Thanks for the response. That would be a real shame, as from a teaching/learning perspective being able to 'close' the feedback loop is an absolute must.

Does anyone know how teachers will be able to feedback on documents submitted by students? 

I assumed that the documents uploaded by students would be converted to PDF, to make them accessible to the plagiarism plugins (for example), and that they would sit nicely in the Moodle grading interface but it seems my assumption was incorrect. 

If the ability to give feedback easily, and in a manner that is familiar to Moodle users is not available, I am worried this project will be a lot less exciting and useful from a teacher's standpoint. 

Cheers, 

Fred

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In reply to Frederic Nevers

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Ken Task -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers

With the recent issues related to PDF Annotations in grading, decided to seek what might be 'out there' in Google La-La-Land which could possibly be an alternative to grading in Moodle.

Have setup a GCE Moodle site and have been working on limited Moodle integration with Google.  Google doesn't offer a 'Classroom' for individuals and only those entities that qualify for a Google EDU Domain can set up Classroom (I think).   Google Classroom, BTW, is worth keeping an eye on ... IMHO.

Ran across a site and GDocs addon called Kaizen.

Kaizena
https://kaizena.com/
A Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement.

Might want to watch these first:

Wonder if the folks at Kaizena would be interested, if someone approached, about collaborating on a Moodle 'plugin'?

The way I see things ... Moodle has grown too monolithic and needs to start looking into microservices.

'spirit of sharing', Ken



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In reply to Damyon Wiese

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Sally Hanford -
Picture of Testers

I'd like to explore if O365 video could be included in some future iteration - the functionality of O365 video is similar to that of 3rd party providers like Kaltura and would be a great way of ensuring moodle can handle video content in a sensible way.

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In reply to Sally Hanford

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Rob Bosch -

Sensible would be to stick with Kaltura.

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In reply to Damyon Wiese

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Jason Hardin -

Can we confirm that as part of this work the Office 365 and G Suite integrations are going to be created? Or is this project just to create the hooks so that other projects can create the actual integrations using the hooks?

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In reply to Jason Hardin

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Frederic Nevers -

Hi Jason, 

Did you ever find out? I am looking for exactly the same answer. 

Cheers, 

Fred

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In reply to Jason Hardin

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Damyon Wiese -

This project includes the work to make those 2 integrations.

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In reply to Damyon Wiese

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Frederic Nevers -

Perfect. Thank you for the clarification. 

Cheers, 

Fred

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In reply to Damyon Wiese

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Brendan Heywood -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

I'm gonna go out on a limb and predict that Dropbox Paper will quickly become the third major player in this space, even though it was only fully released a couple weeks ago. I've been pretty impressed with it so far. I'm not saying it should be supported straight up by moodle but I think it would be prudent to make sure it can fit as well into the overall architecture as 365 and GDocs would.

https://paper.dropbox.com/

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation/http/documentation#paper

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In reply to Damyon Wiese

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Damyon Wiese -

Work has started on this project. The first piece is a new OAuth 2 (and OpenID Connect) authentication plugin and a core configuration page for managing OAuth 2 services including setting up a "system account" for Moodle (and getting refresh tokens). 

A prototype is available here: https://prototype.moodle.net/office/

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In reply to Damyon Wiese

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Frederic Nevers -

That is fantastic news! Very excited about this development. Can I confirm that the tracker is at https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-57794? I would like to make sure I follow development very closely. 

Cheers, 

Fred

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In reply to Frederic Nevers

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Damyon Wiese -

Yes that is the Epic for this project and all work will be done on issues within that Epic.


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In reply to Damyon Wiese

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Damyon Wiese -

I re-read my last post and it is a bit unclear - what it means is you get "Login using Google/Facebook/Microsoft" buttons on the login page and you can configure it to work with many other login systems on the web without installing new plugins etc.



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In reply to Damyon Wiese

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Damyon Wiese -

Progress update:

Most of the work is completed and the prototype just received a major upgrade.

Both core repository plugins (Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive) have been overhauled and work with the new OAuth 2 services. 

The testing instructions for https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-58220 are very detailed and explain the new functionality. 


The most significant feature is that there is a new file type that repositories can support which is a "controlled link". It is a link to a file - but at the time it is added to Moodle - the original resource is copied into an account owned by the Moodle system. Moodle then grants read and (temporary) write access to the link when it is accessed - based on the permissions in Moodle. 


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In reply to Damyon Wiese

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Frederic Nevers -

Hi Damyon, 

Thank you for the hard work. I have tested the system a little bit as a teacher and student, and I have a few questions/comments. 

  • The login with OAuth, addition of files from Google Drive, etc. all worked well.
  • When I added a file from Google Drive, I was expecting the file to then show in a 'Google Doc' frame inside Moodle, so that if I wanted to continue editing the document - then I could (e.g. similar to the work Nadav has done). Instead a simple link to the Google document is presented to the user. Is what I experienced the expected behaviour?
  • In an assignment, if a student uses a Google Doc as their submitted document, the left-panel of the grading interface attempts to convert the document into a PDF/image to launch the Moodle PDF annotator. Is there a way to only show a Google Doc editor on the left-panel instead, so that the teacher has access to the full set of Google tools for commenting, and the power of Moodle rubrics (and other Moodle grading goodness) at the same time? That way, teachers have access to the best of both worlds. 

Cheers, 

Fred

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In reply to Damyon Wiese

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Rob Bosch -

I am not that familiar (yet) with Moodle. As I am more a tech guy than a teacher, I would love to see the embracement of opensource options when it comes to extra functionality.

Therefor, I would suggest to have the option open for Collabora online: the libreoffice online solution. (or similar)

NextCloud already has the option for collabora online. If Moodle could go that direction it would mean that the opensource background of Moodle stays open for external solutions too.

Links:

https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/

https://hub.docker.com/r/collabora/code/

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In reply to Rob Bosch

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

Rob, I couldn't agree more.    Follow MDL-58943 

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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Rob Bosch -

Thanks for the pointer. following the issue (and voted for it)

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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

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In reply to Rob Bosch

回复: Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by wz z -

Onlyoffice may be a better choice than Collabora.

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In reply to Damyon Wiese

Re: Community Meeting re: Office integrations

by Jason Hardin -
Damyon,


Do you know if there will be another set of work planned for 3.4 that will continue to make improvements to this and continue to add more of the functionality in the specification?

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