Building your intranet is like using a recipe. You want to make the final product enjoyable, and to do so, you need to ensure that all of the ingredients are well balanced.

I recently made a delicious dinner for some friends and was later asked how I did it. I slyly said “a little this and that”, but really, it is a tried and true recipe from my step mom, a chef. Over the years I have perfected the dish to make it “my own”, but I still have to peak back at my food stained recipe book to ensure that I am on the right track. With an intranet, similar to cooking a nice meal, users do not see the creative process until it’s perfected and delivered.  Like a good meal, and as the site develops, the users will crave more. 

Intranet design is similar to cooking in that it allows for revisions along the way. An intranet site starts with design applications that provide functionality to the site. You need to build up these applications with text, borders, pictures, in order to make the site operational and appealing to the user’s eyes. Along the way, you can add or remove icons, text boxes and documents to enhance the page. It’s a never ending process of exciting changes that increasingly make the intranet more accessible for the users.

Initiative Allows FE College to Tailor Continuous Professional Development Courses to Individual Staff Requirements

By the end of 2009, JoomlaTraining.com will have run over 100 Joomla training classes in locations from Alaska to Miami and from Los Angeles to London. They now believe its time to expand.

They're adding both Drupal and Wordpress classes. To reflect that change they're launching a new website: OSTraining.com which allows them to rebrand as "Open Source Training"

There are three initial class dates for each new CMS:

Drupal:

• Atlanta - December 7
• Washington D.C. - January 25
• New York - January 27

Wordpress:

• Atlanta - January 12
• New York - January 28
• Houston - February 2
  

Sakai represents a Collaboration and Learning environment that helps to manage users, courses, instructors, and facilities. Sakai comes loaded with a spectrum of tools such as assessment, grading, and messaging, which help readers to improve their coursework using features that support and enhance teaching and learning.

Sakai Courseware Management: The Official Guide is a new book from Packt and is the officially endorsed guide for Sakai. Written by members of the core Sakai team, this book teaches users how to use Sakai, and helps teachers and trainers to design online courses for teaching and collaboration between students.

The reader is introduced to a brief history and an overview of Sakai. As users progress through the book they will start working on a demonstration version of Sakai and create their first course or project site using the concepts in this book. The book also covers a section devoted to working on the Administration Workplace. With the help of ten real-world situations to strengthen the concepts, users will understand the difference between running a demonstration version of Sakai and what is needed to maintain production systems.

Through this book, teachers and developers will learn to design a great online learning experience by exploring the existing technologies and tools, and learning how to use them to their best effect. They will be able to visualize and understand Sakai’s potential to support hundreds of thousands of students by using web services to connect to other systems. They will also be taught the best practices to avoid common errors and pitfalls.

Joomla Training is embarking on an ambitious serious of Joomla classes to help people learn Joomla in their neighborhood. Since Joomla came on the scene in 2005, formal instruction has been spotty and limited to one-off events. Joomla Training is rectifying that with local classes taught by local, experienced instructors.

Based in Atlanta, the company was founded by Steve Burge, from Alledia.com, a long time Joomla blogger and developer.  Last year the company held classes up and down the U.S. East Coast in Atlanta, New York, Washington and Tampa. The success of those sessions encouraged their growth and this year they expanded to the West Coast, holding classes in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Vancouver.

Whereas Burge ran most of the early classes alone, the roster of instructors has now expanded to 8 teachers and is poised to grow futher. Instructors are chosen for their mix of teaching and Joomla experience. They include several qualified teachers and university instructors.

Sign up today and save $200 per person!

Only a few left to save $200
Get in on this MUST ATTEND event!!!
$349 Early bird price is through August 31, 2008.
Price Sept 1 - Oct 31 is $449.
Price as of November 1st is $549.

Visit http://www.cmsassociation.com/1.html for more information.

The 2008 Winter CMS Expo is on Thursday, December 4th and Friday, December 5th. Pre-Conference Sessions are on Wednesday, December 3rd. Whether you're just starting out or you're at the leading edge, CMS Expo has a stellar line-up of Joomla experts coming to the Mile-High City just for you: Samantha Bovat, Steve Burge, Tom Canavan, Mike Carson, Victor Drover, Tom Elliott, Jen McKibben, Andrew Neale, Barrie North, Steve Pignataro, Azrul Rahim, Chris Rault and Bill Tomczak. You just won't find a better place for a meeting of the minds than at CMS Expo.

You're invited to Denver's historic Brown Palace Hotel on December 4th and 5th for the Winter CMS Expo. In the spotlight at the CMS Expo will be Joomla, one of the fastest-growing Open Source CMS solutions around. With millions of installations completed in less than three years since its launch onto the OS scene, Joomla continues to dominate in most arenas, including small- to mid-sized business, non-profits, education and even major municipal and government sectors.

Visit http://www.cmsassociation.com/1.html for more information.