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