I had a go at the new version of SAKAI (2.2.0) which was so kindly provided by Wytze Koopal. It was very interesting to give it a go and I learnt a number of new things. So here a quick resume:

What I liked best in SAKAI:
+ It looks smart and sophisticated
+ There are several places were you can set all sorts of permissions. This allows you to change the impact different people have on different places in the course. You can let students add or remove resources or announcements...
+ You are not confined to your course space but can use materials or announcements from other course spaces or workspaces.
+ Students can work together in groupspaces, this gives you other opportunities than a course.
+ Students can sign up for sections, although I could not figure out what this could offer the student or the teacher... Is this a place where you can offer specific materials or communication?

However, there were also a few points I was not so happy about:
- A course space is a restricted space. It is not easy to create a more open space in which you,or your students, share materials or products with a wider audience. On the other hand, you could use other tools for that job.
- It appears to be designed by a bunch of technical minds. It has not been designed around a simple teacher who wishes to build a simple course with a minimum of fuss. This has led to the following drawbacks:
- The GUI is not logical: if you want to create tabs, make them look like tabs.
- Breadcrumbs help the forlorn to find their way home.
- Resources is one big, rather messy, collection.
- Discussion (always hard to give a good overview) is minimal and not all that clear.
- Adding an image should not require five steps, but you should be able to do it on the fly.
- Perhaps this was a setting on this server, but I could not figure out how to mail a number of students.

I must now go out and see if I can find a server to test the WIKI tool...

But all in all: it is better, it has more functions than before, and these definitely are valuable functions. However, it is not a straightforward system and the GUI does need some improving for the poor basic-use-teacher.