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. |
Laura Gekeler Speaks Her Mind 
To me, I want to be a producer. I want to understand problems and fix them and tell the world about the solution so someone else can fix it themselves. I do not want support to do it for me, because then I feel like I did not learn much. Running systems like these is what makes me feel needed. The less dirty I can get underneath the hood, the less I understand or am needed.
Thank you for posting your findings! I am curious to know if you and Notre Dame’s experience is still the same almost a year down the road. We’ve been with them for a few years, but only recently noticing that the experience seems to be changing.