This archive highlights information about the PENS specification and related events from 2007, a year when European efforts iincreased awareness, adoption and interoperability of PENS implementations.

For additional historical information visit the archives of the AICC News blog, ADL web site, the European Institute for Elearning (EIfEL), the CEN/ISSS Learning Technology Observatory and other elearning resource sites.

iLearning Forum 2008 to includes PENS Interoperability Plugfest, again: Once again, the organizers and exhibitors of the iLearning Forum Conference and Exhibition have chosen to include an Interoperability Plugfest featuring PENS. Marc Van Coillie, CTO of the European Institute for E-Learning (EIfEL) reports that several PENS early adopters and a few newcomers plan to participate. Past participants and current iLearning Forum sponsors include: Questionmark and X-PERTeam. In 2008 the Plugfest will be in the exhibition area, free to the public. This year the Plugfest will emphasize concrete demonstrations of interoperability over presentations about the specification itself or protocol process process.

The iLearning Forum Conference will be held in Paris on 4-5 February 2008 at the Palais des Congrès. The theme of the Conference is Learning in the 21st Century.

PENS.LMSTESTING.COM discontinues HTTPS/SSL service: Sadly, this site has found it necessary to discontinue support for testing over SSL (HTTPS protocol), due to the additional cost of hosting and SSL certificates. Service may be restored in the future if demand warrants the additional expense. Comments or feedback about this can be sent by email at: pens @mobilemind.net.

The PENS Resources page has been updated to strikethrough the references to the SSL-hosted PENS Test Harness and SSL-hosted PENS Command Validator. However, implementers and evaluaters are reminded that it is still critical to support HTTPS URLS with PENS, and they should code and test accordingly with PENS clients, servers and content secured by SSL.

Questionmark Perception supports PENS: Questionmark released Perception v4.4, the first release to officially include PENS support. Questionmark was a PENS Work Group Founder with the AICC, contributing both key PENS concepts and initial code for the PENS HTML Test Harness. The PENS community welcomes their robusy commercial implementation.

LMS Testing Processes 500+ PENS Test Messages: In June 2007, LMS Testing processed its 500th test message with the PENS Test Harness and PENS Command Validator. Although this ia a significant milestone, this represents only a fraction of the total number of PENS commands tested. The Test Harness is available from the AICC (download here), and many developers choose to download it and run it locally or on their own servers. For more information on the URLs and resources available to PENS developers see the LMS Testing PENS Resources page.

REMINDER: Call for Volunteers- AICC PENS Certification Program: The AICC is interested in developing an Interoperability Test document for PENS and a certification program to facilitate interoperability testing and compliance of products supporting PENS. Draft proposals include requirements such as:

• PENS Publishers/clients must submit a valid package of the type specified
• PENS Publishers must support "AICC" and "SCORM 1.2" package types
• PENS Publishers must support issuing commands to both HTTP and HTTP (SSL) URLs
• PENS Command Processors/servers must support "AICC" and "SCORM 1.2" package types
• PENS Command Processors must support both "mailto:" and http/https URLS for both the receipt and alert elements

Those interested in contributing their ideas and time should contact the AICC presentations committee by email at: presentations@aicc.org.

Compsica added to PENS Supporters: Composica is a collaborative authoring platform that has offered support for PENS since April 2006. Thanks to the Compsica team for their support of the PENS specifcation and their persistance in reminding me to post their well-deserved recognition. For more information visit the Composica site to learn about Compsica Enterprise or visit the PENS Supporters page.

Call for Volunteers- AICC PENS Certification Program: The AICC is interested in developing an Interoperability Test document and certification program to facilitate interoperability testing and compliance of products supporting PENS. Those interested in contributing their ideas and time should contact the AICC presentations committee by email at: presentations@aicc.org.

Using PENS with Adobe Captivate 2: Independent developer Stefan van As contributed a helpful article on Using PENS with Adobe Captivate 2 to the Adobe Captivate Developer Center. The article explains PENS and how to use the built-in support for PENS included with Adobe Captivate 2 (Captivate 2 was released in September 2006).

iLearning Forum - Paris Plugfest includes PENS Interoperability: Chairman of the iLearning Forum Plugfest, Marc Van Coillie chose to include AICC PENS as one of the interoperability specifications featured at the iLearning Forum Plugfest running January 29-31, 2007. Other specifications addressed include SCORM 2004 and Liberty Alliance. Thanks to Pierre-Henri Amalric of X-PERTeam for providing an English translation of his presentation on PENS interoperability. The presentation included interoperability using PENS with WBT Manager, Ganesha, Quiz Manager and Course Liner.

X-PERTeam drives European adoption of PENS with Course Liner, Quiz Manager and WBT Manager: Leading European elearning product vendor X-PERTeam provides support for PENS in several products, including Course Liner and Quiz Manager and the French version of WBT Manager. We welcome them to the growing list of PENS Supporters.