 Good afternoon to everybody. So my presentation today is about a couple of projects that were a success and we were able to coordinate between mutual partners, universities or well community in general and asked to be able to implement and integrate into the Mural Mobile application a couple of very interesting features. This is why the title is working together to enhance the Mural App. So first of all I want to add this bit of a disclaimer about the content authenticity. I saw something like this in the internet I don't remember where but I thought it was funny to say that that I am one the human and that there is no AI is involved in the creation of this presentation. All right so this is a brief summary of the contents. First of all I'm going to talk a bit about the Mural App and the different plans or solutions we offer in the team so you can have a full context of everything and then I will talk about how we manage all the process of funding the development of functionality that is going to be part of the Mural App and then finally I will go into specifics and I will talk about a couple of projects that were a success. So first of all very quickly as you know the Mural Mobile application. It is available for Android and Apple devices. It is mostly for students. It works offline that's one of its main features. It supports plugins but is the developer responsibility making the plugin compatible with the mobile application. Another major feature is the ability to receive push notifications and as you can see it's free to use and the code is open source and so numbers we have around eight million active users per month. These numbers might not be very accurate because it depends a lot of the month and also there are a lot of custom mobile applications and other distributions that are using Mural that are also using the version of the mobile application so I think that there are more or less like 10 to 12 million users active per month. So as you know that the Mural App is free. The students they don't have to pay, they don't need to pay anything for using the mobile app but there is an option to purchase a premium subscription or a premium subscription for your Mural site and those are the different subscriptions models and basically what is providing if you purchase a premium subscription are unlimited push notifications for any number of devices and some exclusive functionality like QR code logging and then in some new functionality that we are introducing in 4.3% is biometric logging and also the Matomo integration for analytics that is one of the projects that was a success and I'm going to talk about it today. We also have the branded Mural App that is a replica or your custom version of the Mural App with your institution branding and it supports also Google analytics. It can be used to connect to multiple sites. We have branded apps that are used by the local minister of education for example in Madrid and they have like 1,500 schools and a site finder so a school finder story. You can find your school by name because each school has a Mural installation and then you can connect to that specific installation and of course both the plans and the branded Mural App are helping funding the development of the Mural mobile application because everything costs money and we need money, we need to pay our developers. Yeah, this is the way we made it possible. So, now I'm going to talk about a bit of a history of Mural and because you know that Mural is open source but it has received funding in different occasions. The Penn University has been one of the major contributors. You know the quiz question van over here has been working very hard to support this since a lot of years ago. We have the Mural User Association that is funding thanks to the Associates fee, the development of new features and improvements. Also several institutions have funded for example the Mural Competency Framework or certain functionality and also we have the Mural Partners that thanks to their royalties also thanks to acting as a business partner with us for some projects has been funding also some developments and improvements in both the mobile application and Mural itself. All right, so these are the main benefits when you manage to find funding. As you know that if you find funding and us or a Mural partner does the development quality is something that you will receive as part of the deal. The most important thing I believe is the maintenance, the future maintenance of complex functionality so you pay a one-time fee and then you will have this functionality available for years and years. Of course, prioritization, where the roadmap everything it could be considered one of the main benefits as well and of course at the end is ensuring the long-term sustainability of the Mural project. If you are using Mural a lot you get funding because you want to improve it. These are going to benefit not only you but other institutions. Mural will have a still big reach in the world and that will help the project and everybody using Mural. One thing that is very important to know is that not any improvement or new feature is suitable for core, for the standard Mural app or distribution or app distribution. You need to consider that there are some functionalities or features that are very specific for certain institutions and that maybe they don't make any sense outside your institution. So before thinking that okay I'm going to pay for this and it's going to be part of Mural and I will forget about it. Now we need to do this kind of analysis to see if it's suitable, feasible as you can see. We will be able to maintain this new feature in the long term as well and it is really worth the effort. It is not a major investment in money and resources and the result is not going to worth it. That's something that we need to ensure as well. So this is the overall process. It's about we have a problem statement. We need to identify the real need and the possible solution and then we, Mural HQ, will say this is suitable for core. Yes, in that case, we or a partner with a Mural partner will work with us to ensure that we can make it suitable for Mural core and if not you can always work with a Mural partner so they can create this custom feature for you, mostly creating a new plugin for you or similar. In this process we can see that the three parties are involved that usually the institution that needs this custom, well, the institution that wants this own feature in the core, a Mural partner and Mural HQ because it has to be a three way conversation. So now I'm going to talk about a couple of success stories. I love this picture. It's super nice. The first one is a new feature that was introduced in the Mural MS and the Mural mobile application version 4.2 and is the ability to have end-to-end and key push notifications. This institution, they had a need to ensure that all the push notifications that were processed by external parties such as Google or Apple, they were encrypted to ensure privacy and then they reached us. We said this is very interesting. This could be part of Mural core but we don't have the resources. A good partner such as Catalyst that has development resources can take care of this in coordination with us and then we will integrate this into Mural core. This was a major project. It required both development in Mural MS and also development in our server that we use for push notification that is called Iron Notifier and also in the mobile application. I think that around seven people were involved, some doing project management, other doing development, testers, QA, integrators. I can really show you something very visual because it doesn't make sense for you to see some encrypted tests but this is the result. This is a configuration page in Mural where you can say in 4.2 onwards. Sorry, it is also available in 4.14 if I remember well because it was back ported and then you can say if you want to encrypt all the push notifications that are coming out of the Mural site and also if your students or your users are using all devices that are not able to support encryption, you can say that you don't want them to receive the notifications at all or in that case it's okay if the notifications are not encrypted. As you can see, those Android 8 or iOS 13, they are not very recent versions so for most of our users it should work out of the box and the other one was something that is new in 4.3 in the Mural app version. This in particular didn't require any work in the NMS part so it's only something that we've implemented in our apps portal as well. In this particular, this institution that is the University of Appliance Science, if I remember correctly, sorry, the name is in German. This institution, they were using Matomo that you know probably you know about it but it's like the Google Analytics open source tool that takes a lot of care in privacy matters so it is designed in a way that you can ensure the user privacy when you are tracking the user interactions with the site so what we did in this particular case was to work with the Mural partner learning that coordinate all the process to supporting this functionality in the app and we are making this to be a premium functionality because it needs to be enabled in our apps portal and it basically allows you to indicate your Matomo instance data so you can start tracking the user interactions with the mobile app in the same way you are tracking the user interactions in the Mural site. It is working quite well because we were able, we managed to add a specific filter segment here so when you are watching any page in Matomo like a dashboard or the visitors log or the most recent visitors report you can use this filter to switch between the Mural site website and the Mural app or you can see the both data together so it is quite useful to compare the usage the users are doing and you can check if they are using more or less the mobile app compared to the web version and as I said this is going to be available in the next version of the Mural app and it is going to require a premium subscription premium subscription I didn't say that before it's also free for Mural cloud hosted sites and if your Mural site is hosted by a Mural partner you don't need to pay anything in that case and it is going to require very basic configuration to start working. Yeah that's all I only want to say that the Mural apps team we are available for you we are in the Mural stand that is in the main entrance close to the Mural shop and you can visit us anytime and you can ask anything and I think yeah we have a one I went very quick sorry so we have like 10 to 15 minutes for questions thank you okay so over there I wondered if it will be integrated in the Mural app as well or if the users need to use third-party apps to ensure communication well yeah the integration with matrix basically in the way it works right now in Mural MS is that you can enable it in each course and then you will see a new link so you can open an external app that will be the your favorite matrix client that the most widely used is LMM and our plan is for not the 4.3 version but probably the 4.4 version of the mobile app implement a very similar integration that you will be always in courage or force to use an external app so it is going to be it is going to work very consistently between LMS and the Mural app you are always requested to use an external application in that case but of course this is optional and the current messaging system the internal messaging system is it is going to work as normal in general what we are thinking about sorry this integration is that matrix is the first example but we know that there are some institutions interesting in implementing this as well for Microsoft Teams so we really want to see real use cases and practice and yeah and ensure that we can offer very good experience with users so we will let these functionality to mature a bit in LMS and then we will implement it for the mobile application thank you so have you considered some way for as far as plug-in compatibility or integration compatibility for some way for either HQ or the community to either give a badge or vote on compatibility issues so that when we're looking at plugins for our Mural installation we can tell whether they're compatible or not yes there is already in the Mural plugins database there is an an award I think or a classification that you can search or find plugins with mobile support I think is the name I think is the name is a word right I don't see technical yeah so that already exists and you can list all the all the plugins that are compatible with the mobile application I don't have the numbers but I think that there are like 20 of them more or less or maybe something like that maybe a bit less but yeah but for example in the this morning this Monday there was a death jam and one of two of my colleagues they were working with the plugin developer of sorry developer of the attendance plugin and they made it no sorry check list sorry I always now because attendance is already supported right checklist with a checklist buying and they made it compatible and it was a matter of hours he had some previous work done so that helped a lot but yeah that's that's something you can do and our plans I was talking about this precisely with my colleagues is also for the next version of them mobile app to make more examples to make to provide more tools to developers so they can make their plugins compatible with the mobile easily that's the overall plan but of course it's a bit challenging because they are different technologies is a mobile application is a bit a technology that completely different and web browsers so yeah it's quite a challenge hi maybe it's a bit specific but are you close to solving the notification batch issue on iPhones of giving notifications without opening yeah yeah you mean the batch that it doesn't count the red messages in the exactly so maybe in the new version well it's not an issue is a feature it's not a package a feature that's something that we usually say I understand it so the notification batch number it is displaying the number of unread notifications from the site but it's not really coordinated I mean it works a bit differently between Android and IOS so it's a bit confusing we have an FAQ for for that making it to work in a way to be very consistent with LMS is quite a challenge because it will require a lot of development in LMS site and there are potential performance issues there is an issue open about it and if you go to the stand later I can point you to the to the tracker issue about it if you cannot find it but this was discussed but right now we consider it to be a feature but of course it is a bit confusing we understand that