Category: news

We've just launched the MSG Map Widget, so you can embed a Google map displaying who is on or offline on MSG. Options to filter on the group name/description (course code/title for OpenLearn) are also available. Full details plus demo.

Next up on the list is creating a similar widget for displaying your own MSG presence status… which should be available in the next week or so!

I’ve tried to make the installation of MSG (and the MSG-Moodle block) a little easier by providing a package to download, so you don’t have to get the code from our CVS server - and means you get a package of all compatible components. I think some of the issues people had in installing MSG were to do with the fact they had different versions or packages which weren’t always compatible with each other. For details of the package (and installation instructions) see: http://technologies.kmi.open.ac.uk/msg/developer/msg-installation-guide/

MSG presence maps are now live on both the OpenLearn LearningSpace and LabSpace websites. Previously MSG was only available on LabSpace, so bringing it over, along with the presence maps, to LearningSpace will open MSG to a much wider audience.

All feedback/comments about MSG and the new presence maps is welcome, please post to our MSG Forum (no longer available).

Here are a couple of pics from one of our servers showing the geographical spread of LabSpace users - couple of quick notes, firstly, only my contacts are shown (which represents only about 25% of the total number of users), and secondly, although this is taken from one of our development servers, the data is real - this also explains why only one user (me!) is shown as online…

The MSG Presence Maps have been launched live on our msg.open.ac.uk server and are coming soon to LabSpace and LearningSpace servers. To get people started We've created a short demonstration video …

If you like to view a higher quality version of the video than please visit: https://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/osc/screencasts/msg-maps-demo/

The latest version of MSG Alert has been released (download). The changes in this verison are:

• Support for notify host and host be on different servers, the previous version of MSGAlert assumed these would always be the same - but now you can select seperate servers if necessary.
• Link to MSG Presence Map - now you can call up our Google Maps integration directly from MSGAlert, you can then view where in the world all your contacts are and update your own location. Currently this is only supported on the msg.open.ac.uk server, but it will also be on msg-openlearn.open.ac.uk soon 🙂

We've now set up a CVS server to allow anyone else access to the source code for MSG, so you can run your own MSG server. We've also included details and source code for the MSG-Moodle block.

Details of the CVS server and installation guide can be found on our developers pages.

We’d welcome any feedback on the installation guide or if you have problems with your installation - if you have problems or find the instructions aren’t clear chances are others will too and your feedback will help us improve the documentation 🙂

We've just released an updated version of MSG Alert (download). It’s been rewritten in Visual C# and includes a couple of new features…

• Automatically sets your presence to ‘away’ when your screensaver is running
• Notification balloon when new message arrrives. Many users commented that they didn’t always notice when they received a new message (the notification was a little too subtle!), so we have now implemented a notification balloon which appears for a few seconds when a new message arrives, this should be more noticable, but not intrusive. Preview…
  

The LabSpace website has been updated with some improvements from the MSG, the key new feature being that once you log into LabSpace you are automatically also logged in to MSG. In the LabSpace header you can see your MSG status and this icon will also alert you if you receive a new message.

This morning we made some ‘behind the scenes’ updates to the MSG web client for LabSpace users, which will provide some noticable improvements for users, the main ones being:

• Much quicker login process. Previously the login process could timeout, giving ‘disconnected’ messages, but now the login should be almost instant.
• More dynamic roster. Now, when you or other users enrol (or unenrol) on courses, your roster will change dynamically, previously you needed to log out and back in again for roster updates to take effect.

Please let us know if you have any queries regarding MSG, please email us.