What is PENS, and when should I use it?

Starting from version 4.5, EKP supports the Package Exchange Notification Services (PENS). PENS enables one-click publishing of courses from a PENS-conformant authoring tool or LCMS to EKP. Note that PENS is not a format for learning content like SCORM or AICC CMI001. That is, by itself it does not define any formats or protocols for course catalog metadata, course structure, course/LMS communication, or sequencing. PENS simply defines a way for a publishing tool to notify a delivery system (LMS) that new content is available for collection. The relevant content is still transferred using an establish format such as SCORM or AICC packages (most commonly the former).

So PENS is not an alternative to, say, SCORM content packages. Rather, it simply eliminates the step of manually exporting a content package from the publishing system and then importing it into EKP. Note that if your workflow requires you to make use of the packages (e.g. you need to manually modify the packages, or wish to archive them outside of EKP) then it's probably not appropriate to use PENS.

How can I use PENS to enable one-click publishing from an authoring tool or LCMS to EKP?

Starting from version 4.5, EKP supports the Package Exchange Notification Services (PENS). PENS enables one-click publishing of courses from a PENS-conformant authoring tool or LCMS to EKP.

To configure the authoring tool or LCMS to publish courses to EKP using PENS, you will need three pieces of information: a URL, a user name, and a password.

The URL is simply the base URL for the site, followed by pens. A typical URL is shown below; if you have changed the default protocol or path for your site, you'll need to modify this URL as appropriate.

http://ekp.example.com/ekp/pens

(N.B. If you encounter problems, check that you can access the PENS URL directly in a browser. You should get a response similar to the one below. If you see a 404 Not Found message or similar, there might be a configuration problem with your web server; see I get a 404 Not Found page when accessing EKP's PENS URL, what should I do? for an explanation of how to resolve it.)

error=0
error-text=collect command received and understood
version=1.0.0
pens-data=

The user name and password should correspond to an EKP user in a role that allows them to import courses.

I get a 404 Not Found page when accessing EKP's PENS URL, what should I do?

Starting from version 4.5, EKP supports the Package Exchange Notification Services (PENS). The URL used for notifications is typically /ekp/pens.

If you see a 404 Not Found error when attempting to access this URL, it's likely that your web server (e.g. Apache HTTPD) is not configured to forward requests for this URL to your application server (e.g. Apache Tomcat).

If your web server is Apache, you can fix this by editing the httpd.conf configuration file, which is in the conf/ directory under the Apache installation directory. If you open this file in a text editor, you will find a series of "directives" such as the following:

JkMount /ekp/tx/* ajp13
JkMount /ekp/servlet/* ajp13
JkMount /ekp/*.jsp ajp13
JkMount /ekp/servlet/ekp/* ajp13
JkMount /ekp/*.tx ajp13
JkMount /ekp/xml/* ajp13

(Note: in some installations, the above directives might be in a file named mod_jk.conf under the directory conf/jk/, instead of in httpd.conf itself.)

To enable PENS support, you should add one more directive as follows:

JkMount /ekp/pens ajp13

You'll need to restart Apache for that change to take effect. Note also that if the prefix for your site is something other than /ekp, you'll need to modify the directive above as appropriate.