Welcome Back

So its a new year, and its been a while since I last updated this blog! And things have changed! (In a good way). Looking back at 2006, we achieved some great milestones. I don't know if everyone realizes this, but we released 6 new versions of VirtualOffice, and 5 versions of HomeRoom!! And we aren't even close to adding and refining as many features as we have planned!

This year is going to be amazing. We are going to be releasing a revolutionary new technology that will speed up your course websites that we spent the past several months developing and refining. We are also working on a really cool online quiz and test generator that will allow you to automatically grade your students exams and tie directly into your grade books. Additionally we be releasing more features that let you share your resources and websites with other teachers. You will also notice us refining many of the existing features to make them easier to use and more powerful.

As always, this service and company has been built for you, our teachers. You are our investors, our clients, and ultimately, we report to you. So please keep the feedback coming, without it we wouldn't be where we are today.

Cheers, Dan

VirtualOffice 2.6 and HomeRoom 1.4 Released!

Its official folks, VirtualOffice 2.6 and HomeRoom 1.4 have been released! So what's new with each release? We chose to go in a slightly new direction for these two releases.

VirtualOffice is pretty well rounded at this point. You have a grade book, forums, drop boxes, custom pages, document download sections, announcements, and much more. A teacher using VirtualOffice has a lot of tools to use! So we decided to make VirtualOffice a bit more fun to use by allowing teachers to create their own unique styles to use for their course websites! We also decided that with the release of Internet Explorer 7 and its awesome new RSS feed reader, we would start letting each course website you guys build have its own RSS broadcast! So in summary:

• Custom Styles: Sure we have some good looking styles to offer you, but why not let you also have the option to create your own unique style? With the custom style tool you can create, save, and edit as many custom styles for your courses as you want! The sky is the limit!
• Course RSS Feeds: Your student have HomeRoom, which does a great job of keeping them informed of what's going on in your class, but what if they could get a live feed of everything going on, even if they aren't on your website or in HomeRoom? We at E-Office Hours are all about communication, so the new RSS feed generator will automatically create a live RSS broadcast for your students to subscribe to. You don't have to do anything! What's even cooler is that every course you create has its own broadcast!

So what did we do with HomeRoom? HomeRoom is about getting help and keeping informed. We have the keeping informed part down pretty well, and students can ask teachers questions, post to forums, or even ask their Virtual TA a question! But all of this limits the student to interactions solely within their classes. We have extended their network of help to the entire HomeRoom community! Now they can get help with any subject using our awesome online study group feature! In summary:

• Online Study Groups: As stated above, the more people you can ask for help, the better your chances are of getting it. So with our new study group feature, students can create or join online study groups through their HomeRoom, and get instant access to our network of thousands of students. Each study group allows students to post questions and comments to a private message board and share resources such as links and files with the rest of the group. If a student knows a great site to get info about human anatomy, or has a good PDF about solving quadratic equations, they can easily share it! Furthermore, students can create private study groups, where other students must be approved before they can join. As always, security is a top priority.

In addition to the above features, we have added some new security protocol's to our products, further tuned our products for faster performance, and much more! We hope you guys enjoy the new versions as much as we enjoyed creating them!

Cheers, Dan

Neighborhood Watch

If you grew up in suburbia, you probably saw those neighborhood watch signs around, or you probably at least saw or heard about neighborhood watches on TV. The idea is simple: People watching out for their neighbors. Sure police are nice to have, but when they cant be there, its always nice to know that your neighbor has your back and is watching out for you.

In a recent email we sent out, we notified our users of a recent abuse within VirtualOffice. A very nice teacher reported that a couple of websites were created with inappropriate material, in violation of our service agreement. We basically had two options. 1) Cancel the accounts and hope it doesn't happen again, or 2) cancel the accounts and take immediate action. We chose option 2.

Our users mean a lot to us. Heck, without them, there is no E-Office Hours! We are always delighted to get feedback from our users (good or bad) and we continue to endorse a policy of honesty when it comes to communication. This is why we decided to let our users know a week in advance of the steps we would be taking to lock down and secure E-Office Hours.

After some pretty lengthy debates and several good ideas, we decided that a neighborhood watch was the best option for securing E-Office Hours and preventing unwanted people from signing up. The idea is that from now on, whenever a new user signs up, we will notify everyone at their school using VirtualOffice. We then allow all users at their school to verify that they know the new user. If they are verified, great! If not, we at E-Office Hours are notified and perform an independent verification on that new user. I can't disclose what that process is for security reasons, but its pretty extensive. A new user can still set up their website and build the classes, but they just cant be added to their school officially until they are verified. This essentially means that students cant find the new user's course websites using our website.

This new neighborhood watch system achieves 2 goals:

1. Our software and its users (teachers, students, parents) are further protected and safe.
2. Our users are not hindered and stopped from performing their work, or otherwise severely restricted from using VirtualOffice.

During the week we allotted for user feedback, we had a lot of positive emails, giving us overwhelming support for our new security measures. Some teachers even volunteered to verify colleagues in the district as well as their school!!! So now that its out the door, the E-Office Hours community can rest assured that everyone is watching out for them, and that they are safe. Its a good feeling, isn't it?

Cheers, Dan

VirtualOffice 2.5 Released!

So VirtualOffice 2.5 is finally out the door, and although it may not seem like a big release in terms of tons of new features, it is huge in other ways. First and foremost a lot of you will notice the new "Teacher Chat" button. This is a new section we just added for teacher forums that will allow our VirtualOffice users to talk and collaborate across the globe. This is the first of many new collaboration features to come.

VirtualOffice started out as a tool to help teachers quickly build powerful course websites to supplement and help their students classroom experience. As the VirtualOffice community continues to grow around the world, so does the need for communication. We are therefore in the midst of building the first teacher collaboration environment available, and by linking it directly to our VirtualOffice tools, will create a very powerful teaching resource and tool.

In addition to the Teacher Chat forums, you will notice the addition of the grade book. Its finally here!!! The new grade book allows you to quickly enter grades, compute averages, apply weights and grade scales, and deliver grades to your students in a quick and private manner. We are already working on additional features for the grade book that will allow you to collect detailed stats on your students grades, make custom notes, and much more.

We will be testing the new version in production all weekend, so please be patient and be sure to tell us if you encounter any problems. Stay tuned for more exciting releases!

Cheers, Dan

CNet.com Reviews E-Office Hours

For those of you not familiar with CNet.com, they are a big name in the technology world. They review and write about any and all things technology. As such, they are very respected in the high tech industry.

We at E-Office Hours were delighted and proud to learn that they took the time to review VirtualOffice! You can check out the review at:

http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6627068.html

Technology is changing and evolving all the time. Teachers not only have to deal with their students, classrooms, and various daily challenges, but increasingly they are being asked to incorporate more technology into the classroom. So what we have tried to do is make the transition as easy as possible by designing VirtualOffice to be as user friendly and simple as possible to use without sacrificing the latest technological advances the web has to offer.

Our ambition and goal was validated when Mr. Needelman said that "it's free and it's simple, and it's easier to set up a Web site for a course with a tool such as this than it would be to apply a general-purpose Web publishing tool to the job. "

We hope that this will be the first amongst many positive reviews to come, but regardless we will continue to build the best product available, and the only product of this caliber available to you for free!!

Cheers, Dan

P.S. As Mr. Needleman said, the grade book will be released very soon! It's currently in testing and will be released in a matter of weeks.

Grades, Grades, Grades

So what does every teacher have in common? Well for one, they all do grades! (for the most part at least). As I've stated time and again, this venture is about you, the teachers, students and educational community at large. Its about what you want, what you need, and about getting it to you quickly and effectively.

With that in mind, this upcoming release is going to be a bit different. I am going to go against convention, and tell you that in our next release we will be giving you a grade book! We have already spoken to several teachers and have a pretty good list of features that will be introduced for the grade book, but we also realize that every teacher has their own style of grading, and so as hard as we try, we wont be able to hit this one exactly on the head first time around, but we do want to try. We will be sending out a formal survey to all of you very soon outlining our current feature set for the first version of the grade book, asking you to vote on your preferred features, and giving you the opportunity to suggest features you would like to see! But before we do that, I thought I would start an informal discussion here to get some ideas. So here is what you will see in the first version of the grade book:

• Add an Assignment: Easily add a new assignment column to your grade book (including name, point value, etc.)
• Quick Edit: Edit any grade by clicking it, simulating writing on a piece of paper, its real time!
• Sort: Sort your grades by students, or any assignment score.
• Export/Import: Export your grade book to an excel spreadsheet, or import your grades into your VirtualOffice.
• Print Friendly: Generate a clean, print friendly version of your grades to post up.
• Apply Weights: Apply a bell curve or other method to your grade book.
• Publish: Make your grades available to your students in their HomeRoom. This would ensure absolute privacy to all your students.

Anyway, this is a short list, and we have tones more ideas, but those will be saved for future releases. In the mean time though, we would love to hear about features you would like to see!

Cheers, Dan

VirtualOffice 2.4 is Out!

All the hard work has paid off! VirtualOffice 2.4 is out! As most of you already know by now, we have just released the latest version of VirtualOffice. This was a relatively big release.

So what did we add? In summary:

• Course Glossary: Students need to know terms and definitions, and sure you could put your own glossary page together using our webpage creator, but we thought we would take it further, and let you not only add terms and definitions in a snap, but also let your students suggest their own terms and definitions! In case you haven't noticed, we believe that your website (like your classroom) should be interactive. Even cooler is the auto-indexing feature! Every time you create a glossary word, our technology will auto-index your entire website and turn every instance of a glossary word into a pop up definition word! All your student has to do is place their mouse over the word, and the definition pops up! How cool is that?! I know I could have used that when I was in school.
  
• Forum Upgrades: This one comes directly from our users (special thanks to Felicia Estrada and Marjory Thrash on this one!). Sure our forums are easy to set up and easy to use, but why not make them a bit more powerful? To do that, we are now allowing you and your students to attach a document to any post your create, and we allow you to add quick comments and posts to any existing post, allowing you add your 2 cents (or more if you like) to any existing post.
  
• Messaging System Upgrade: Once again, this one comes from our users. Many times teachers want to send messages to groups of students or parents. Our new groups feature allows you to create custom groups of website users (teachers or students) that you can then send messages to.
  
• Tell-A-Friend: I've said it before, and I'll say it again. We love our users! And we like to think they like us too :) So we have added a new feature that lets you (our users) spread the word quickly and conveniently from your VirtualOffice. Simply fill in the names and emails of friends and colleagues who might be interested in VirtualOffice, and we'll send them some quick info! We do not save any of the information you submit, and under no circumstances do we spam.
  
• Upgrades, Upgrades, Upgrades: We love upgrades! We are always looking for new ways and new technology to make things run faster and smoother for you, and we've done it again! Our new upgrades should make your experience a lot better and faster.

That covers the major new features, and I hope you enjoy them! We have been getting a lot of great feedback from our users lately (ranging from 4th grade teachers to university profs), so we must be doing something right. Time to start working on the next big release! Stay tuned.

Cheers, Dan