By: Michael Feldstein

Michael Feldstein — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:02:25 +0000

Hi Laura,
Great post. I’ll respond to just a few pieces of it. First of all, like many community-driven open source projects, Sakai isn’t great at doing marketing and communications outside of the adoptee community. They’ve gotten better over the last couple of years, but they still have a lot of work to do. And the webinar that you attended in particular was aimed primarily at existing Sakai adoptees–specifically, it was focused on informing them about the major re-architecture that is underway and recruit development resources. (Hence, the Amway feel.) This was a pitch aimed at schools that are already committed to the product, many of whom have contributed development resources in the past. I have suggested to Michael Korcuska that it would be a good idea to do a different webinar aimed at non-Sakai schools.
Regarding your questions, keep in mind that Sakai v3 doesn’t exist yet. We can talk about the goals and intentions, and we can also talk about what exists in prototype, but we can’t say with certainty what the capabilities of the final product will be. So the devil you don’t know is going to stay unknown for a while yet. For that reason, you may choose to wait a while longer before evaluating v3. The current version is another story. Josh Barron of Marist College is hosting a webinar tomorrow at noon Eastern time on his college’s migration process to the current version of Sakai. You can register for it here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/823713953. I would also recommend going to one of the Sakai support vendors (e.g., Unicon or rSmart) to get a product pitch that focuses on answering your questions and feels a little bit more like what you’re used to getting from your vendors.
On the SIS integration front, I think there are good reasons to be hopeful. Unicon has contributed support for the IMS LIS standard to the current version of Sakai. (I happen to know a bit about this because it’s one of the things I work on at Oracle and I’m on the IMS working group for the standard.) LIS is specifically designed for SIS/LMS interoperability. Sungard has publicly committed to implementing the standard, but has not announced when that support would come. You might want to ask them about it. There’s work being done by Berkeley for Sakai 3 that would bake this integration standard and, more generally, interoperability support for a range of identity management standards, into the core of the product.

Comments on: Follow up on Sakai 3 Webinar …

By: Michael Feldstein