At our Leadership Forums we didn’t have time to answer all of the questions that were raised throughout the day, so as promised we’ve published our responses to you online. 

Presentations from the two days are now available online for you to view and enjoy. 

So where were we? 

1) Do you offer a variety of learner interfaces suitable to age/KS/ability/SEN?  On top of that, can schools get their own look and feel into the system, if so, to what level?
OPENHIVE has a variety of Primary themes and Secondary themes for different age groups and key stages.  Each school has the flexibility to choose which theme they wish to deploy across their whole site.  Individual users can also personalise their own MySite with a different theme to that of the school.  On top of this, OPENHIVElearning allows users (teachers and learners) to change their own background themes, imagery and colours from a wide selection available within the site library. 

2) Can you import taxonomies or external schemes of work?
Yes we can. OPENHIVE supports external schemes of work and taxonomies.

3)  If the portal is provisioned across an authority or campus, does that mean that students will be able to see and add friends from across the authority and not just her tutor group or school? Who has control of this?
This level is flexibility is available within OPENHIVE.  This will be on a site permission basis.  If you wish to allow students to see/add friends from other schools within the authority, your site administrator could set this up.

4) How does OPENHIVEinsight cope with parent access/OLR in these scenarios:

- A child is in care & requires access by 5 adult carers
OPENHIVEiD, our identity management service, would support this scenario.  OPENHIVE can enable and manage access for multiple adults per child, but the carers/guardians must reside in the MIS system as approved carers/adults.

- A parent has 4 children at one school and 2 at another – both use OPENHIVE
OPENHIVEiD supports multiple children across multiple schools through one login, so long as the schools are federated or part of the same Local Authority.

- A child’s parents are divorced.  One parent is not allowed access
OPENHIVEiD takes the MIS information as the authoritative source of data.  This information should reside in the MIS and will therefore affect the access rights within OPENHIVE.  Even if the parent tried to register to access OPENHIVE they would not be able to.

- A teacher is also a parent of a child in the same school. Do they get access to reporting for all children they teach or just their own child?
As a teacher you would have a different interface/area to access information about all of the children you teach to specific parental information about your own child.

5) We currently have a SharePoint 2007 platform with a lot of content in it, how do you accommodate this if we move to OPENHIVE in terms of data migration?
For each new customer we undertake a provisioning consultancy process to identify and agree a migration plan for all of the content you wish to migrate to OPENHIVE.  We have significant expertise in helping customers transition and migrate between SharePoint platforms.

6) Will England win the world cup? 
It is unlikely, but we can hope

7) What information from your VLE and courses is available to Senior Leadership Teams?
OPENHIIVElearning, our VLE provides comprehensive reports and information for Senior Leadership Teams.  Reports are available on the following:
- Attendance
- Subject attainment
- Course attainment
- Targets
- Student attainment
- Student achievement

8 ) Is there a choice of font – in particular Century Gothic?  
Yes, you can have a choice of font.  Like with most websites, so long as you have the fonts installed on your machine you can use them.  If you want to specify Century Gothic as your font in SharePoint, you can.  Our Silverlight applications make use of Trebuchet or Myriad Pro which is embedded in the Silverlight application itself.  

9) Is your VLE based on SLK or is it entirely designed in-house?
SLK sits underneath OPENHIVElearning, although we have added in some bespoke customisation to tailor it for an educational context.

10) Social Networking – How much control does the user have over the provision e.g. Not appearing in friends of friends lists or not being able to be emailed etc?   
Currently no control exists over a user being able to deny or accept friend requests. This is an area we are looking to develop in future releases of OPENHIVE.

11) Ad Hoc Groups – you mentioned you could flexibility allocate permissions for ad hoc groups. Do these groups/could they have team sites created to allow information and resources to be delivered?
Yes, this is currently in development.

12) Can students add resources to the VLE resources library?  Can students create their own courses and share them with each other?
Currently no, students cannot create their own courses or add resources to courses.  We are however exploring possibilities with this in the next release of OPENHIVElearning, which is currently in development.

13) Assigned Courses – Can students join courses that have not been assigned to them, or request to join them?
Currently no, however, we are exploring possibilities with this in the next release of OPENHIVElearning that is currently in development.  

14) Just a consideration – there has been a lot of mentions of the iPad etc, isn’t Silverlight support required for this?
Currently Silverlight is not supported on the iPhone or the iPad.

15) What limitations does OPENHIVE present that a standard MSSP install doesn’t if any? Also can the school add web parts or is this restricted?
The only limitations on the portal are the themes. It is a standard MSSP install.  Schools can add their own web parts, change and customise the layout or add whatever content they wish.

16) Friends in 14-19 – with students studying at multiple schools can friends be extended over trusted sites? Similarly for federated schools?
Currently no, however we are exploring these possibilities in future releases of OPENHIVE.

 17) OPENHIVE Training & CPD – What training do you provide to customers and how is this related to CPD? To what extent is the online help related to:
- the features  and ‘ how to’ in OPENHIVE?
- the features of and ‘how to’ in SharePoint?
- related to the ‘why to’ of school life and learning?  
OPENHIVE modules are supplied as standard with initial ‘getting started’ training. Synetrix offers additional training modules and resources to further develop and embed the learning platform.  The online help service and information within OPENHIVE is more ‘how to’ driven to help our users get started quickly.

Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange email are delivered with specific help files that reference OPENHIVE customisations/adaptations.   Where generic information is required for Microsoft product enquiries, we have augmented our help with useful links to Microsoft help resources.   OPENHIVElearning is specific to the features of OPENHIVElearning.  Throughout our help materials, we have tried to set the ‘how to’ information in context to the ‘why’ for school life and learning.  

28) Beyond individual schools, can you comment on deployment to a Local Authority or a chain of free schools and how inter establishment collaboration can take place? 
Response to follow…  

29) Does your next / planned VLE leverage ULURU functionality?   
Response to follow…