Semestry News

Like the rest of the world, Eveoh has taken some measures to minimize the impact of COVID-19 on our operations. At this moment, our operations continue as usual, but we do have some requests to our users to streamline the process.

Since the beginning of this year, Eveoh has moved to a new release process. We now release new MyTimetable versions multiple times per month, leading to small and incremental releases. This gives our customers the opportunity to take advantage of new features sooner and avoids lenghty upgrade processes to the latest MyTimetable version.

Eveoh now has a standard Data Processing Agreement available for all customers. We strongly urge all customers to sign this agreement as having a Data Processing Agreement in place is required under the GDPR.

MyTimetable has added Scientia Exam Scheduler to its wide range of connectors, which also includes Scientia’s Syllabus Plus, Semestry TermTime and Untis. The new connector allows Syllabus Plus users to publish exam timetables from Exam Scheduler, without the need to feed back exam activities into Syllabus Plus.

MyTimetable now offers support for Gruber & Petters Untis timetables. All common MyTimetable features are available, such as personalising timetables, staged publication, draft timetables, and support for multiple study years. Integration with calendaring applications is possible through iCalendar subscriptions, and by pushing timetables to Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Exchange and Google Apps for Education. Currently, support for class, subject, teacher and room timetables is available.

Recently, we moved a part of our MyTimetable caching layer from Ehcache to Infinispan. We also started to cache more aggressively in order to optimise performance. In this post we discuss some of the challenges encoured when trying to configure Infinispan and JGroups from Spring.

In order to query a user’s Active Directory properties from a Java application, we have a couple of possibilities. The most obvious option is to directly query using an LDAP connection through JNDI. Since Active Directory, by default, does not support anonymous binds, this requires a user account in the AD domain, storing/maintaining the user account in the application configuration, and a simple or Kerberos bind on the LDAP connection. All doable, but why not use the computer’s domain credentials (assuming the computer is part of the AD domain)?

Recently, we switched to Gradle as build tool of MyTimetable. Previously, we have been using Ant. While Ant certainly is a good build tool (Gradle uses Ant internally), it lacks declarative dependency management. To introduce declarative dependency management we have considered a couple of options: Ivy (with Ant), Maven or Gradle. In the end we went with Gradle, because it offers the most flexibility with the least amount of work involved. Maven leads to an XML/plugin hell for certain custom scenarios, and Ivy/Ant lacks good multi-project support (sure you can have multiple projects with Ivy/Ant, but you have to do all the hard work yourself).

It’s an exciting time at Semestry and Tribal Group as they welcome the MyTimetable team from Eveoh to join them in fulfilling their promise: to help your institution provide the right schedules for everyone.

The University of Exeter has launched Eveoh’s MyTimetable to present personalised timetables to their 18,000 students and staff members. Exeter is one of the United Kingdom’s most popular and successful universities and combines world leading research with very high levels of student satisfaction.