We have added a number of new features this week, mainly around the Portfolio Builder, as well as continuing to improve the existing functionality of the website.

The new Portfolio Builder features enable portfolios people create to be shared therefor enabling the quality assurance checks to be made. This is an important milestone for us as this idea is at the heart of the website's concept to provide a means for training organisations and professionals who do spend the time, effort and money on ensuring they are delivering the highest quality services to advertise this hard work.

New Portfolio Builder Features

1) A read only version of the Portfolio Page viewer has been created. This has allowed portfolio's to be shared with people other than the owner. People can only view evidence that they have permission to see. A portfolio can consist of evidence with different security levels, the Portfolio Builder ensures that viewers are only able to see what they are allowed to. Anyone viewing the portfolio page can see the summary details of the evidence but not the evidence itself unless they have permission.

2) Portfolios that have been linked with a Skill Profile are now able to be reviewed from a person's Profile page.

As I am not a trainer or assessor but a computer techie I don't have a HSE portfolio to share. However I do help run a Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme which requires me to maintain a portfolio. I have started to create this portfolio on the site to give people the idea of how it works. Please visit my profile page to try out the reviewing of a portfolio! I have also created a portfolio of video clips I created at the Focus on First Aid conference which I sent to my Evidence Store by mobile phone text message.

http://www.safetytrainingnetwork.co.uk/person/STNPONOW58.aspx

3) Addition of a column showing what the security level of the evidence of a page is. It is important to note that you do not set the security on the page in a portfolio but on the evidence that you assign to the page.

4) The Portfolio Builder now allows you to assign a portfolio you have created as a template to create other portfolio's from. So for example if you have created a portfolio for 2008 and you wanted to create a portfolio for 2009 with the same pages to fill in then you can now do this easily.

General Improvements

• We have been reviewing the usability of the site and are replacing most of the grids used to edit data with popup pages. We hope that this will make creating and maintaining data easier.
• We have made the single sign in button more prominent as we think this is a really useful feature (probably deserving its own article of what it is and how it works). I love being able to login to my Safety Training Network account by using my Facebook sign in! One less password to remember.
• Moved the buttons to add evidence to the Evidence Store onto the Evidence Store page.
• Allow Course Types to be deleted.
• Improved the Trainer / Assessor invitation action from the Person profile page.