Lance and I updated those at the project planning meeting in St. Paul
on the status of assignments2, and we wanted also to circulate the
information more broadly.

Assignment2 (http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/2oGI) is
not targeted for inclusion in the next Sakai release, but it will be
running in production at both IU and GT by this August.  IU will be
deploying "Iteration 3" on June 21, while GT is pushing ahead with an
"Iteration 5" (likely not deployed until mid-July) which adds to the
service layer JSON feeds for more easily reworking the UI.  Iteration
5 will be going through an extended period of usability testing and UI
refinement beginning mid-May.

HIGHLIGHTS
- tighter gradebook integration which avoids UX issues arising from
grading support fragmented across both tools.  RSF helpers are used to
pull in functionality from the gradebook (usually in the form of
thickboxes).  This tighter integration is not without potential
consequence (e.g. assignments permissions have disappeared, and
gradebook permissions are used instead), but it does not mean that the
gradebook tool has to be present in a site in order for the
assignment2 tool to work.
- RSF is used as a presentation technology, and the interface has been
generally simplified.
- greater unit test coverage.
- versioning is introduced for assignment submissions.
- a variety of smaller functional refinements that speak to pain
points experienced at both IU and Georgia Tech.  A complete list of
these still needs to be collected and cleaned up.

MIGRATION
- Assignment2 stands as a distinct tool, and not an "upgrade" or
replacement of the legacy tool.  Migration, such as it is, would be
managed by site-to-site import as an action initiated by a site
maintainer, and not a global conversion script or utility.  Both IU
and GT plan to have both assignments tools enabled during an initial
term, providing both choice and the ability to import assignment
content from previous sites.
- Some testing has been conducted against both Sakai 2.4.x and Sakai
2.5.x, but the required gradebook API is the one sitting in trunk, and
so a new gradebook deployment would also be required to run
assignment2 reliably.

ROADMAP
A clear roadmap has not been established beyond the needs of the
production rollouts needed in July-August, but a couple milestones
have already been identified:
- writing to JCR for content storage (and excising the versioning code
that currently resides within assignment2).
- incorporating goal management and custom rubrics.
- custom workflows for such things as peer review, double-blind review, etc.

The tool will also be presented in Paris

-- 
Clay

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