OPUS and ASET, ten years on
ColinTen years ago today, I and a few colleagues from Ulster University presented some of our work on on-line Placement Management at the ASET conference in York. At that time our system was simply called the Placement Management System or PMS, and yes of course this led to more than a few comments.
At that stage we had been working on the project for some 5 years, so it's a useful reminder just how much time I ended up spending on that project.
Now called OPUS that system still exists, was released as Open Source and was and is used by a number of Universities. Though Ulster is developing an alternative system it hasn't yet subsumed all the functionality in OPUS and I'm back to maintaining the system in a low key way.
I recently fixed some bugs introduced by a well meaning volunteer over two years ago, which felt quite good - while they were low on impact they were irritating in some aspects of usage. In the process I found that our custom framework, written by myself and Gordon Crawford for version 4 of both OPUS and the PDSystem to work with the Smarty Template Engine, is broken with Smarty version 3.
I intend to fix that problem, and do what may be a last release of OPUS, which will bring some improvements in speed, and localisation and internationalisation. Of course the source is still available directly from the version control on the site, so nobody has to wait on me - but I've had some recent queries from HEIs in India, so there is still interest in the system and its Debian packaging.
For those wanting the walk down memory lane, and for my own archival purposes, those slides from ten years ago are here: aset-york-pms-2005-09-05.
