Case Study: HarvestRoad Hive Explorer
Thank you to John Townsend, of HarvestRoad who provided some information about how Reload has been integrated into their HarvestRoad Hive product.
HarvestRoad is an Australian based, publicly listed company that specializes in content management for eLearning. Its flagship product is HarvestRoad Hive, a federated, digital repository system. Hive provides repository services for all types of digital content and URLs. Features include check in/out, version control, copyright management, support for any metadata schema, full text and metadata searching, built in configurable workflow engine for implementing quality control processes, auditing and logging of all transactions, reporting, content conversions and the ability to serve actual content to the "runtime" environment for multiple learning management systems simultaneously. For a schematic view of how HarvestRoad sees the Content Assembly Process, click on the following screenshot:
Hive Explorer is a java client application that provides a rich interface to complement the existing browser based interface to Hive. Hive Explorer provides browsing, searching and advanced publishing features for the Hive repository. HarvestRoad has integrated Hive Explorer with RELOAD Editor so that you can use a Hive repository in addition to your local file system. Consequently, a RELOAD user can:
- browse or search the Hive repository to locate learning objects
- drag and drop content (latest or specific versions) as files or as links from Hive to a new content package
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re-use metadata from Hive to describe the content in your packages
- specify the rendition format that will be delivered to the end user (eg, convert MS Word to HTML, XML or other formats)
- create a content package that refers to content as stored in Hive (ie, the package doesn't contain content)
- import metadata created using the RELOAD Metadata editor when you upload local content to Hive
- automatically disassemble a content package, publishing each component to Hive and editing the manifest file to refer to the content as stored in Hive (by URL).
- manage preferences for the creation of links, versions, formats and other attributes.
For a screenshot showing HarvestRoad Hive Explorer with Reload, and some further information, click the screenshot below.
In addition to the integration with RELOAD, Hive Explorer offers other tools to assist you to publish content to Hive, including a batch publish facility and automated HTML publication, which also automates the editing of links so that they refer to components by Hive URLs instead of local file references.
OKI Support
Hive Explorer will also support OKI (Q2 2005) repository OSIDs. This will enable RELOAD users to use Hive Explorer to browse and search other OKI compliant repositories, and enable other tools to access content in this way from Hive. Further details about OKI support will be provided as development proceeds.
Hive Explorer is included as a free option with HarvestRoad Hive.
