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Equella 5 Digital Repository Adds Portlets, Dashboards

• By David Nagel
• 04/19/11

Pearson has released an update to Equella, a digital repository for higher education and K-12. The latest release, version 5.0, gains new interface enhancements, as well as support for customizing dashboards and building portlets.

Equella, aside from serving as a repository for learning objects, also provides content authoring and content management functionality, including a Web-based WYSIWYG HTML editor that can be used to create both static and dynamic HTML pages. The digital repository offers search by keyword, content type, and metadata; hierarchical browsing; and federated search across external repositories.

Equella supports a range of standards, including IMS/IMS DRI, METS, and SCORM 1.3/2004; and OAI-PMH; various authentication standards, including LDAP and Shibboleth; SOAP and WSDL; and library system interfaces, including MADS, MARC 21, MARCXML, and MODS, among others. And it integrates with popular learning management systems, including third-party commercial and open source LMSes, including Moodle, Sakai, and various Blackboard systems, including Angle LMSes, Vista, CE, Academic Suite, and Learn.

Equella 5, announced late last week, adds several new features, including customizability for users in the form of dashboards and portlets. Portlets provide users with a destination for accessing specific types of content. Dashboards let users add multiple types of content to their pages.

Version 5 also includes general enhancements to the user interface and import and export capabilities supporting external repositories. And it adds enhancements to the Harvester component, allowing it to "schedule content harvests from third-party sources, including other Equella repositories, and directly harvest the metadata, content and resources,:" according to the company.

Equella 5 is available now. Further information can be found here.