I wound up having an almost serendipitous conversation with the gentleman responsible for hosting the Lotus Webinar series. He'd had some first hand experience with this stuff and I sensed he felt my pain. He ran through a list of potential remedies until one worked. It turned out to be the settings in the Live and Forum server document. These settings weren't available through my reading and weren't covered by Lotus tech support. You should make the following Forum server document entries after both servers have been installed:

• Add LearningSpace Admin to the Create New Databases field in the Restrictions section.

• Add LSReplication and LearningSpace Admin to the Create New Replicas field in the Restrictions section.

• Add Notes Template Development/Lotus Notes to the Run Restricted LotusScript/Java agents field in the Agent Manager section.

• Add Notes Template Development/Lotus Notes to the Run Unrestricted LotusScript/Java agents field in the Agent Manager section.

You should make the following Live server document entries after both servers have been installed:

• Add LSReplication to the Create New Replicas field in the Restrictions section.

• Add SameTime Development/Lotus Notes Companion Products to the Run Restricted LotusScript/Java agents field in the Agent Manager section.

• Add SameTime Development/Lotus Notes Companion Products to the Run Unrestricted LotusScript/Java agents field in the Agent Manager section.

Installation was by far the most painful part of my experience with LearningSpace. The rest of the implementation was much more pleasurable.

The five faces of Forum
Forum courses are created and administered through a Lotus Notes database called LearningSpace Central. Instructors or course administrators can access the LearningSpace Central Administrator Tools area, which provides an action button to trigger the creation of a LearningSpace course. The creation process uses a sequence of dialogs which walk the user through a very deliberate process. Ultimately, and slowly, I might add, this process spawns a set of five unique databases into it's own directory within the Domino data structure.

The end result is a very clean set of databases crafted to work equally well from a Lotus Notes client or Internet browser. The set consists of the following:

• Schedule: course entry point and syllabus

• Course Room: course assignments and discussion threads

• Media Center: storage of all rich content which can be linked to schedule documents

• Profiles: student and instructor vitals and returned assessments

• Assessment: creation and grading of instructor-defined tests

I quickly discovered that the design of this complex application was hidden, so even if I wanted to, there wasn't too much I could change in terms of basic functionality. However, the development team does allow for a lot of customization by changing configuration and individual document settings. One prime example of this ability is shown in Figure A.