Target Instance for evaluation

We have had a lot of discussion about what we should test.  Sakai is a highly flexible and customizable application which lends some challenge about how to get the most useful information out of our UI walkthroughs.  Testing the out of the box version may not give us as a realistic usage pictureas focusing on an institution's already configured production version that has real data.  It may also be rather difficult to find an out of the box version of Sakai with persistent data.  The nightly build, nightly2.sakaiproject.org, is wiped clean with each build every 4 hours.  On the other hand, there are issues with using a customized version too.   A specific skin can change user experience of the application quite significantly...improving or adding usability issues in the out of the box version. 

Below is are various screen shots of Sakai: 

Sakai Nightly 2.4

bSpace before 8/2007

 

 bSpace after 8/2007