Wednesday, June 18, 2014

The NexPort Solutions Blog has a New Home!

- 26 comments
In order to better consolidate all of our information and news we have move our blog to our main website.

The new blog can be found here:

http://www.nexportsolutions.com/nexport-solutions-blog

About NexPort Solutions Group
NexPort Solutions Group is a division of Darwin Global, LLC, a systems and software engineering company that provides innovative, cost-effective training solutions and support for federal, state and local government, as well as the private sector.
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Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Playing YouTube Videos in a Media Assignment

- 26 comments
In this tutorial I will describe how to play a YouTube video in a NexPort Campus Media Assignment.

What You'll Need

  • The embed code for a YouTube video
  • Familiarity with creating Sections and Assignments and Permissions to edit a Section and it's assignments
  • The attached YouTube Wrapper File

Step 1

First you must obtain the EMBED code for your video from YouTube. In order to do this you must navigate to the video you wish to use. Below the video find the link that says SHARE and then find the link that says EMBED. YouTube will provide you with the code in a textarea (see image to the left). Copy this code.
Embed Code on YouTube

Step 2

Next you must download the wrapper file and replace the IFRAME code with the code you obtained from YouTube.
Code to be replaced in wrapper
Save the file with the replaced code.

Step 3

Finally you must log into NexPort Campus and create a media assignment. Select the Upload Media option and use the Upload Media button to upload the wrapper file with the new embed code. Save the assignment and use the View Media button to test it or enroll in the section and check it out.

About NexPort Solutions Group
NexPort Solutions Group is a division of Darwin Global, LLC, a systems and software engineering company that provides innovative, cost-effective training solutions and support for federal, state and local government, as well as the private sector.
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Wednesday, March 26, 2014

NexPort Solutions releases NexPort Campus v. 5.0.9, providing users with increased speed for section listings, bug fixes and improved UI, introduces NexPort Scheduling Services

- 15 comments
OKLAHOMA CITY – March 25, 2014 – NexPort Solutions Group is excited to announce NexPort Campus v. 5.0.9 point release, which introduces NexPort Scheduling Services. This release adds a force repair feature to fix broken transcript records, few visual enhancements, increased speed and fixes numerous bugs.

New Features
Customer Service now has the ability to force repair any broken transcript records. Force generating transcript records allows fixes broken transcript records for students whose records have stopped synchronizing with a student's enrollments.

Performance Enhancements
With 5.0.9, NexPort users will experience a new way in which the system handles scheduled jobs. NexPort Campus now uses a separate service for scheduled jobs called NexPort Scheduling Services, which runs on its own server, compared to previous versions that ran on NexPort Campus servers. NSS ensures background work, such as deleting large organizations, cleaning up subscriptions or indexing user accounts, will not affect the performance of the main user interface.

Users will also experience faster loading of section listings. NexPort Campus section listings in Group Management will now load at a faster speed.

Major Bugs Fixes
With this release, NexPort users will also find issues they may have previously encountered now resolved. NexPort software engineers work closely with customer service to fix any bugs users might confront. One of these bug fixes includes edit options showing correctly when selecting the top organization in the “Recent” groups listing. Before, this option was showing the edit options as non-editable.  

Users will also no longer receive an error when filtering or sorting by “Last Assignment Activity Date” column. Last Assignment Activity Date is not a sortable column in the system. It was inadvertently made sortable in the UI. The column is no longer sortable as of this release.

Other error fixes include:
  • Uploading a file in the transcript evaluation tool no longer generates an error and allows users to upload the file without complication.
  • NexPort internal reporting system pagination for enrollment reports now correctly generates blank pages, while it had previously generated them Ad infinitum.
  • Last update dates in the Ed2go integration API logging now show correctly.
  • Searches for organizations and groups in the Group Management search tool was broken in 5.0.8 and now works again.
  • The database connection pool size can now be configured by system administrators.
  • When running a subscription report, a column for “Number of Enrollments” is available. This column was not being updated properly.

About NexPort Campus
NexPort Campus is a secure, hosted learning and knowledge management system. NexPort Campus also supports interactive engagement within learning communities through the use of videos, organization-wide calendar, shared documents, organization-wide webpages and threaded discussions. Additional system features include data interoperability with external systems, secure digital libraries with subscriber-only access and an integrated Student Information System (SIS).

NexPort Campus also allows clients to provide their learners with customized, on-demand training and education environment. Clients operate within their own branded portals to deliver their unique content and services independently of each other. Customers may subdivide their portals to establish and manage subordinate secure portals for their customers, subsidiaries or divisions. Each portal provides privacy protection and security. Your custom portal can be setup with Secure Sockets Layer technology (128-bit encryption) and a custom domain.


NexPort Solutions Group enables educators and learners to use NexPort Campus to create, organize and hold webmeetings using NexPort Solutions Group’s own NexMeeting. NexMeeting promotes virtual learning, providing users with the ability to share desktops, hold conversations using headset and telephonic audio, survey meeting participants and share videos, PowerPoint slides, photos and documents using the whiteboard.

Discussion

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{{{LEAVE THE LINE BELOW IN PLACE}}} About NexPort Solutions Group
NexPort Solutions Group is a division of Darwin Global, LLC, a systems and software engineering company that provides innovative, cost-effective training solutions and support for federal, state and local government, as well as the private sector.
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Monday, March 17, 2014

The Florida Department of Corrections Online Highschool Program has 100th Graduate

- 13 comments
The Florida Department of Corrections (FLDOC) Online Highschool Program has just seen it's 100th Graduate! The FLDOC program is is administerded by our partner Smarthorizons Career Online Education and hosted on the NexPort Campus Learning Platform.

Read the full article here.

About NexPort Solutions Group
NexPort Solutions Group is a division of Darwin Global, LLC, a systems and software engineering company that provides innovative, cost-effective training solutions and support for federal, state and local government, as well as the private sector.
[Continue reading...]

Friday, November 15, 2013

NexPort Solutions Introduces NexPort Reporting Services

- 9 comments
OKLAHOMA CITY – July 1, 2013 – NexPort Solutions is proud to announce its newest product, NexPort Reporting Services (NRS). NRS offers fast-loading adhoc and comparison reports with detailed help documentation.

NRS reports load quickly using Solr, a document database, rather than a relational database. The latest release from NRS also presents report data with compact tabular display. The site provides users with step-by-step web-based help guides to assist the user every step of the way.

Adhoc Reports

NRS offers NexPort engineers developed a human-readable filter within the NRS Custom Report Builder, as well as provided the users with the ability to filter and display all mapped student data from NexPort Campus, the corresponding LMS.  Training plan enrollment reporting allows users access to pacing data, with assignment status and transcript reporting also available.

Users are now able to save and share custom reports with permitted users in a group, as well as set reports to send to select users’ email addresses on a schedule. The scheduled report email notifications can be set up using the flexible scheduling interface. Permitted users may also save, view and/or download reports any time. Reports are also auto-saved for each report type within NRS, so even if you forget to save your report, a saved version is available.

NexPort users now also have the capability to convert previously created NexPort Campus reports into an NRS report. This is a simple and painless transition, with NRS being developed to better serve NexPort Campus report users.

Comparison Reports

NRS also provides users with comparison reports, which allow the user to compare pacing, comparison and/or transcript data for members of a group. Comparison reports allow the user to focus on specific student data in the comparison. Users are also able to save a group to their “Favorites” for easy loading of comparison data.

About NexPort Solutions Group
NexPort Solutions Group is a division of Darwin Global, LLC, a systems and software engineering company that provides innovative, cost-effective training solutions and support for federal, state and local government, as well as the private sector.

Media Contact:
Darcy Delaney
Documentation Specialist
Darwin Global Enterprises
405-217-4060
http://www.nexportsolutions.com/
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Friday, September 13, 2013

NexPort Solutions 5.0 Provides Improved Customer Support, Faster Performance, Sleek UI

- 17 comments
OKLAHOMA CITY – September 13, 2013 – NexPort Solutions Group today released NexPort Campus version 5.0, which includes 320 bug fixes and performance improvements, 17 enhancements and a new writing assignment feature. This release features an easy-to-navigate NexPort Campus with faster loading time and new writing assignments UI to make NexPort more user-friendly and intuitive.

Technical Enhancements
NexPort engineers provided an extensive amount of work toward version 5.0 on technical enhancements, with the main enhancement being that of removing the dependency on Castle:ActiveRecord from the data access layer.

"Castle ActiveRecord is an open source Object Relational Mapper (ORM) that has provided a strong and flexible Data Access Layer for NexPort since version 1,” said Dan Pupek, NexPort Solutions Group Chief Systems Architect. “Two factors have driven our decision to no longer use ActiveRecord. First, ActiveRecord has become an obsolete project and is no longer supported by its community. We were not willing to fork our own version. Second, ActiveRecord was merely an abstraction layer on top of a more robust ORM called Nhibernate. Moving forward, NexPort will use Nhibernate directly."

Engineers also made the transition to Couchbase for data caching. This provides a faster loading time for NexPort Campus.

"Since version 3, we have used Memcached to provide a data-caching layer between NexPort and the database server,” Pupek said. “This data caching speeds up the site by relieving the database server of some of its work. As of version 5.0, NexPort will use Couchbase or caching. Couchbase is a modern 64-bit Memchached implementation that supports higher speed access and simplified clustering.

"Both of these moves from ActiveRecord and from Memcached will keep our technology relevant, allow us to expand more quickly and provide additional performance for future capacity requirements," Pupek said.

Performance Enhancements
Version 5.0 provides performance enhancements to force enrollments and user upload, cutting wait time for both the administrator and the student significantly.

This release also sends users with quicker results for force enrollments on groups with a large number of memberships, with administrators providing enrollments to students more quickly than previous versions of NexPort Campus.

A second performance enhancement provides administrators the ability to be more efficient when executing user upload. Bulk user upload is now processed in the background, meaning administrators no longer have to wait for the upload to complete. Instead, they will receive an email notice when the action has been completed.

General Enhancements
NexPort Campus version 5.0 now allows more functionality and a modern user interface through enhancements to rich text, writing assignments, customer support and student enrollments.

First, assignment titles now support using rich text with a fully functional rich text editor, with question fields of writing assignments being able to be saved as rich text. Both of these provide versatility for administrators and instructors.

Next, this release implements a new look for writing assignments for students and instructors. NexPort furnishes a more polished version of writing assignment, with the ability for requests for submissions and multiple drafts to be submitted from the student, as well as the system producing and distributing emails. Once the student has completed the draft, the instructor will receive an email notification. When the instructor provides feedback, NexPort Campus will generate an email notice to the student.

“The writing assignment user interface changes were brought about because of two ideas: We wanted to improve usability and streamline the functionality to eventually allow administrators to specify their own look and feel for the site,” said Brette Forinash, NexPort Solutions Software Engineer. “The sleek new interface will allow students to focus on their work without being distracted by coloring schemes or awkward alignment.”

NexPort Campus version 5.0 also provides customers with improved technical support. A template for customer service representatives allows NexPort users with the ability to respond to a customer support message that asks specific questions customized to help specifically with their current issue. Customer service can then reply with a more precise response to the user.

A fourth enhancement allows administrators to enroll students directly into a course from the enrollments tab in the user profile, providing a more streamlined process for administrators and other system operators.

Major Bugs Fixes
NexPort users not only received numerous enhancements with this release, but various bugs were resolved and performance improvements were conducted during this release. In the past, the NexPort server had timed-out when adding more than 380 question banks to a NexPort test. This is no longer the case, allowing NexPort users to upload as many question banks as necessary with no glitch in the system.

Users are also able to access manage groups when preferences are corrupted. This was previously a dilemma for NexPort users. Group management preferences now use two specific tables to keep track of preferences and recent groups. Administrators are also able to use the bulk uploading users feature with welcome letters, CC and BCC emails without receiving an error message.

This release was designed to provide quicker results for administrators, and thus, students. It was centered on supplying backend fixes that users do not necessarily see, but they deal with every day in NexPort. This release presents users with a cleaner version of NexPort Campus that is easier to navigate without error, making our users’ experience effortless.

About NexPort Campus
NexPort Campus is a secure, hosted learning and knowledge management system. NexPort Campus also supports interactive engagement within learning communities through the use of videos, organization-wide calendar, shared documents, organization-wide webpages and threaded discussions. Additional system features include data interoperability with external systems, secure digital libraries with subscriber-only access and an integrated Student Information System (SIS).

NexPort Campus also allows clients to provide their learners with customized, on-demand training and education environment. Clients operate within their own branded portals to deliver their unique content and services independently of each other. Customers may subdivide their portals to establish and manage subordinate secure portals for their customers, subsidiaries or divisions. Each portal provides privacy protection and security. Your custom portal can be setup with Secure Sockets Layer technology (128-bit encryption) and a custom domain.

NexPort Solutions Group enables educators and learners to use NexPort Campus to create, organize and hold webmeetings using NexPort Solutions Group’s own NexMeeting. NexMeeting promotes virtual learning, providing users with the ability to share desktops, hold conversations using headset and telephonic audio, survey meeting participants and share videos, PowerPoint slides, photos and documents using the whiteboard.

About NexPort Solutions Group
NexPort Solutions Group is a division of Darwin Global, LLC, a systems and software engineering company that provides innovative, cost-effective training solutions and support for federal, state and local government, as well as the private sector.

Media Contact:
Darcy Delaney
Documentation Specialist
Darwin Global Enterprises
405-217-4060
http://www.nexportsolutions.com/ 
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Wednesday, July 31, 2013

NexPort Solutions Continues to Provide a Secure, Reliable Learning Management System Through TierPoint, LLC’s Hosting Services

- 132 comments
OKLAHOMA CITY – July 19, 2013 – NexPort Solutions Group is proud to announce its partnership with TierPoint, LLC, a managed services provider. TierPoint is a leading, nationwide provider of cloud, collocation and managed services. Relying upon TierPoint’s extensive network of multi-layered, state-of-the-art data centers in the United States, and backed by the expertise of TierPoint’s industry veterans, NexPort Solutions continues to provide NexPort Campus, NexMeeting and NexPort Reporting Services users with secure, reliable educational services.

TierPoint was formed through the strategic combination of several leading regional providers: Colo4 in Texas; Perimeter Technology Center in Oklahoma, Baltimore Technology Park in Maryland, Adhost in Washington and TierPoint in Washington. All locations are now operating as TierPoint. NexPort Solutions previously teamed with Perimeter Technology Center.

"I have enjoyed working hand-in-hand with Perimeter Technology Center for the past six years," said Billy Caldwell, NexPort Solutions' KAG Administrator. "They have been more than just a vendor, they have been a partner focused on our mutual growth and success. As PTC joins forces with Tierpoint, LLC, I expect that relationship will continue to flourish. It will open doors that will continue to refine and enhance our infrastructure."

Through TierPoint, NexPort Solutions provides its users with:

  • Performance: Uptime, speed, and power that meet all NexPort users’ needs
  • Scalability: Users receive what they need, when they need it, with a suite of solutions from cloud computing to colocation space 
  • Security: Multi-layered systems to protect the NexPort users’ physical and virtual assets around the clock. 
  • Support: A seasoned team of industry experts dedicated to ensuring every user maintains its unique online presence, 24x7x365, regardless of communications disruptions, weather events or natural disasters.
  • Peace of Mind: TierPoint has owned and operated data centers in key locations across the U.S.

TierPoint supplies its customers with fast and secure service, as well as disaster recovery services that ensure NexPort Solutions’ users will not lose their Internet presence during severe weather or other emergencies that could occur near the data center.

"As a software engineer/architect for more than 12 years, I have seen first-hand the value that a professional, high availability and dedicated team of hardware and network engineers can bring to a software development organization," said Dan Pupek, NexPort Solutions' Chief Systems Architect. "Perimeter Technology Center has been a strong and responsive partner for many years and now, as they merge with Tierpoint, LLC, I envision our partnership strengthening. I look forward to hosting both our production and development environments in their secure cloud infrastructure."

NexPort Campus is a secure, hosted learning and knowledge management system. NexPort Campus also supports interactive engagement within learning communities through the use of videos, organization-wide calendar, shared documents, organization-wide webpages and threaded discussions. Additional system features include data interoperability with external systems, secure digital libraries with subscriber-only access and an integrated Student Information System (SIS).


“NexPort Solutions is a Software as a Service (SaaS) vendor. Its customers include organizations that support online schools, law enforcement organizations, courseware development businesses, and social services organizations.  These customers must have a reliable, secure, and robust Internet presence. If students cannot access their lessons, or if managers cannot access their reports, NexPort Solutions’ customers are in violation of their contracts,” stated Dr Rob Miller, NexPort Solutions’ Chief Knowledge Officer. 

NexPort Campus also allows clients to provide their learners with customized, on-demand training and education environment. Clients operate within their own branded portals to deliver their unique content and services independently of each other. Customers may subdivide their portals to establish and manage subordinate secure portals for their customers, subsidiaries or divisions. Each portal provides privacy protection and security. Your custom portal can be setup with Secure Sockets Layer technology (128-bit encryption) and a custom domain.

Dr. Miller further stated, “Increasingly, NexPort Solutions supports customers that operate online high schools for state correctional facilities.  By contract, those customers must report any service disruption to that state’s department of corrections—the customer wants to know if NexPort solutions is truly delivering the services they pay for.  Therefore, it is imperative that NexPort Solutions have an extremely reliable data center provider.”  

NexPort Solutions Group enables educators and learners to use NexPort Campus to create, organize and hold webmeetings using NexPort Solutions Group’s own NexMeeting. NexMeeting promotes virtual classroom experiences, providing users with the ability to share desktops, hold conversations using headset and telephonic audio, survey meeting participants and share videos, PowerPoint slides, photos and documents using the whiteboard.

About NexPort Solutions Group
NexPort Solutions Group is a division of Darwin Global, LLC, a systems and software engineering company that provides innovative, cost-effective training solutions and support for federal, state and local government, as well as the private sector.


Media Contact:
Darcy Delaney
Documentation Specialist
Darwin Global Enterprises
405-217-4060
http://www.nexportsolutions.com/
[Continue reading...]
 
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