Pros and Cons of hosting Sakai outside of your institution

Posted on January 4, 2012 | 1 Comment

The University of Notre Dame is moving from a proprietary LMS we host in our own Data Center to an open source system, Sakai, hosted with rSmart. Two big changes we’re lumping together. Ask yourself …

What advantages do you expect to gain when switching from a proprietary system to an open source system?

Does outsourcing the system’s management mitigate against those advantages?

What we’ve found so far (6 months):

Trade-offs  
Some Fixes/enhancements: can still be deployed faster than with a proprietary system, but not as fast as we expected … rSmart, or other provider, will still have tested version combinations and be reluctant to share risk with you of deploying a tool version in a lesser tested Sakai version
Staffing. You can redeploy your app admin to direct faculty support and do away with sys admin, DBA, etc. You didn’t have Developers before & by hosting, any development (customizations even) you wanted to contribute now will be problematic unless you still build an in-house development/test instance.
TCO: You may find the costs between licensing/hosting yourself and not-licensing hosting elsewhere to be very similar. You are re-arranging your human resources, which could bring advantages to your faculty despite the similar cost of ownership.
SIS integration: Always more difficult when your ‘home data’ has to be shared with someone off-site. Particularly bad at the moment as the industry transitions from former methods of SIS- LMS integration to the new LIS 2.0 standard.
Part of fixes/enhancements, that of User Acceptance Testing, involves back and forth communication, and management of Help Desk ticketing between you and your host vendor. You have a dependency on the ability to use a test or 2nd instance with your live data, but this synchronization between live and test is no longer handled by you – but by your vendor.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Collaborative Learning Environment, Here at Notre Dame, LMS, Sakai, Web/Tech

Tagged

Bringing Blackboard Vista 8 into the Oracle 11g world..

Posted on December 2, 2011 | Leave a comment

Just a few notes, probably only of significance to myself, of the work involved when the technology around a software changes even as that software is being brought to an end of life…

Blackboard’s CE and Vista product is scheduled to be de-supported in January of 2013. Notre Dame will continue to run it as we come along side it with another system and move our Faculty and Students to it.

  • Meanwhile Oracle has de-supported (as of June 2010) its database software version Oracle 10g, on which many institutions have been running their Bb Vista databases.
  • Meanwhile Oracle has acquired Java and issued Update 29 of Java 6 (available for PCs Oct 10th and for Mac 10.6.8 and Mac 10.7.1 shortly thereafter) with which Bb Vista 8 doesn’t play well.
  • Meanwhile Oracle 11g is being deployed as a database cluster – RAC, that is, a feature some of this older software wouldn’t have dreamed of.

This just makes keeping the old girl running that much more of an effort.

This week here at Notre Dame we validated our Bb Vista 8 Dev environment to service pack 6 (SP6) on our Oracle 11g RAC database farm. Here were our tests:

Test Result
NDCustom copy content tool (uses siapi) perl, cron, DB link to Banner, permissions, UI display: all looks good
Created supersections with our NDcustom job (uses siapi) Same as above. Passed.
Took a quiz while stopping the database on one node (no failover). System Exception error. Session remained open. Saved answers were saved. When database ‘returned’ saves continued. Repeated logged messages as app tried to reconnect to the database. Passed
Took a quiz while gracefully failing over database nodes. No system exception error. Session remained open. Everything saved correctly. Only indication the db node had failed over was watching the netstat –a close connections on 1 db and open on another node, also saw 1 unpinned connection error in the logs. RAC works!
JMS real-time messaging server failover Still fails. Same behavior as always. Recommend Weblogic setting to leave Target set to a single non-migratable node.
Background Jobs: Garbage Collection. Deleted hundreds of courses. Checked timing & completion. No essential change in performance. GC completes & took over an hour. Our live system job  averages 2 hrs nightly on 10g to complete. We now anticipate the same on 11g.
Background Jobs: Content Index Search No essential change between 10g and 11g. Works. Passes.
Background Jobs: Tracking Event No essential change between 10g and 11g. Works. Passes.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Course Management Server-side, Here at Notre Dame, KnowledgeBaseVista4, LMS

rSmart and SunGard Re-evaluate their Partnership

Posted on November 2, 2011 | Leave a comment

The partnership announced a little over a year ago [SunGard Press Release, Sept. 28, 2010]  has certainly not deteriorated, just undergone a metamorphosis in the light of work with several clients. While initially envisioned to include sales support and subscriptions utilizing SunGard resources, the past year has indicated clients find that structure, not easier, but more difficult.

 Chris Coppola of rSmart, in a recent email, put it this way, “We just didn’t see the benefits we thought we would from a sales perspective.”

 The two service providers continue to pool their resources when assisting clients in integrating their rSmart-hosted Sakai CLE with SunGard’s SIS product lines. In this respect they continue to learn from each other, and find this to be the true value-add for their clients.

 The University of Notre Dame is one of those clients, on track to put our rSmart-hosted CLE into full production with real-time and batch integrations to our SunGard Banner SIS. We’re enjoying full implementation support from both SunGard and rSmart engineers in standing up the Banner Event Publisher, a new SunGard technology, with Sakai as its first fully configured subscriber.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , ,