Kuali Foundation aggregator

Everything Kuali by rSmart: KFS Accounting Line Import Feature Helps You Work Efficiently

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:43:41 -0500

As I explained in earlier posts, global e-docs are among the most helpful features in the Kuali Financial System. Another time-saving feature of the system is mass import of accounting lines and other data. This feature is especially helpful when users have multiple lines of accounting data to enter and do not want to enter each line separately. Using this feature, they can quickly enter data into an import template and then upload it into the appropriate electronic document.

Kuali Foundation Communications: Kuali Rice Project Hires Lead Technical Architect

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:13:43 -0500

Posted:

Mar 08, 2010

Dear Kuali Colleagues,

I am happy to announce that Tom Bradford has been hired as the new Lead Technical Architect for the Kuali Rice project. Tom will be starting in this role on Monday, March 15.

The Kuali Rice project has been steadily growing over the past few years. As we continue to plan for the future and move the vision for the Rice project forward, the need for a dedicated Lead Architect has been of increasing importance. In conjunction with the roadmap committees, Tom will help to define and implement a roadmap for technology and architecture improvements that align with the objectives of all Kuali projects and Rice investing partners.

Tom brings with him an extensive background in software architecture and engineering which makes him a great fit for this position and a true asset to the community. He has most recently worked for rSmart, where he was involved in various projects related to Kuali Rice and the Kuali Financial System. During this time, he also contributed to the Kuali Rice project as a part-time team member.

Please join me in welcoming Tom to the Rice project and the Kuali community!

Thank you
Eric Westfall
Kuali Rice Project Manager
Indiana University

KS Reporter: Kuali Student Launches Facebook Fan Page

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:30:00 -0500

Filtered Affiliate Feeds: Oracle and Rimini Street battle over 3rd party support

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:32:22 -0500

I read the recent news about Rimini Street’s battle with Oracle with great interest this past week.

The Chronicle headline last Sunday was “A Small Company, Promising Major Savings on Vital Software, Lures Colleges.” The issue highlighted in the story:

Cost-conscious colleges are caught in the cross-fire of a legal battle between Rimini Street, the low-cost maintenance provider, and Oracle, a software powerhouse that serves hundreds of higher-education customers. In January, Oracle sued Rimini Street for running what Oracle calls an “illegal” and “corrupt” business model.

Rimini Street offers colleges and universities 3rd party support at half the cost of their current ERP maintenance contract. It’s not for everyone, but for schools that want to “freeze” their current ERP it seems like a great deal. Some schools intend to “stay put” with their current system for many years. They don’t want to go through required upgrades, they just need to stay current with fixes and regulatory updates, and they need someone who can help when issues come up. Other institutions intend to move from their current solution to something else. A transition like this is often a costly, multi-year endeavor. Because these institutions simply need to maintain & support what they have during the transition, Rimini Street is a great option because half of what they were paying the vendor for support can be applied to the cost of the transition.

This battle may stretch out for several years like the Blackboard patent dispute. If it does, Colleges and Universities will lose in the process. Like the Blackboard dispute, which was ultimately settled favorably (the patent was invalidated), it’s easy to get drawn into the gory details of the dispute. Why? Because it has potentially dramatic consequences for all of us who care about getting more value out of IT for the good of education.

There’s no question that, like the Blackboard patent battle, the consequences are very real for the companies involved, and their customers. A lot of money will be spent that doesn’t do anything to create real value, and that money ultimately comes from colleges and universities. In these hard economic times it’s difficult to stomach.

But rather than focusing on the details of this dispute, our time is better spent working toward the evolution toward more community developed software and educational resources. Initiatives like Kuali and Sakai are providing alternatives that make it easy to un-bundle software and services. For colleges and universities that means disputes like the one between Oracle and Rimini Street won’t limit competitive services. A few interesting things are happening:

A lot more value is being created through collaborations that result in open educational resources. There is a growing amount of commodity software, and software core to the business of Education that is substantially driven by, if not fully, open source. The same goes for other open educational resources (OER). If you haven’t been following Brad Wheeler’s “Collaboration IS Strategy” it’s worth catching up on.
- Community developed software like Kuali, Sakai, and Moodle.
- Open textbooks
- Open content, journals, etc.
Entirely new companies have emerged with new business models to fill the void where the evolution of community driven resources have advanced faster than the incumbent vendors’ ability to adapt. And they are growing rapidly.
- rSmart
- Flat World Knowledge
- Rimini Street
- MoodleRooms
A lot of IT services that have been historically been delivered by individual institutions’ IT departments are moving “Above Campus.” Email, office applications, eLearning, content, and even ERP applications are being crowd-sourced and cloud-sourced.

What do these things have in common? From my perspective they are all market-driven forces that are challenging the status quo because the status quo isn’t delivering enough value. Educational institutions need to get more value from IT if they are going to live up to the potential of education to help us address some really big challenges affecting us all.

Tagged: bigshift, community, education, kuali, legal, open source, sakai, technology

Kuali Foundation Communications: Indiana University and University of Hawaii Partner on Kuali IT Support

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:11:03 -0500

Posted:

Mar 03, 2010

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (link to original article)– The Kuali Foundation has announced that Indiana University and the University of Hawaii are inviting partners to join them to develop Kuali IT Support, a new incubation project envisioned to offer a set of components that will provide more effective solutions for IT support in higher education while significantly lowering costs.

The first phase of this project will focus on building a knowledge management system (KMS) which leverages IU’s award-winning Knowledge Base and extends it into a next-generation collaborative system that shares not only code, but also content among institutions. The KMS will enable management of content in a modular, unified way to maximize opportunities for sharing and reuse, while increasing efficiency by reducing the duplication of effort. It will leverage the deep understanding that the project’s partners have about their own institutions’ services and deliver that expert information in the exact form and format that their communities need.

Kuali IT Support will join other successful Kuali community projects, including Kuali Financial System, Kuali Coeus for research administration, Kuali Student, Kuali Open Library Environment (OLE), Kuali Ready for Business Continuity, and Kuali Rice middleware infrastructure, and will lay the foundation for higher education institutions to implement best practices in delivering excellent IT support.

IU Associate Vice President for Communication and Support Sue Workman said, “Creating a community source knowledge management system that can be shared is a perfect fit as a Kuali Foundation project. This above-campus service initiative will make it possible for institutions to work collaboratively and create and maintain documents in a single repository and use them in multiple places. Many of us support the same applications and services – why not leverage the content among us? At IU, including all overhead, our activity-based cost for IT support is $14.19 for a face-to-face consultation and $10 for a phone call. Providing an answer using our KB costs only $.07.”

David Lassner, vice president for information technology and CEO at the University of Hawaii said, “We had just reached a point when we realized we would need to make an investment in improving the applications that support our Help Desk, our local knowledge base, and related information services. Given the opportunity to work with IU and other like-minded institutions, we decided that our efforts could be better applied to a project that would achieve more together than any of us would be able to accomplish on our own.” Lassner added, “We are especially excited about a shared, customizable knowledge base that can help students, faculty, and staff anywhere find solutions to common technical problems on their own.”

Indiana University has extensive experience in knowledge management, having created, maintained, and delivered IT support content for more than 20 years. The IU Knowledge Base (KB), a unique knowledge management and content workflow system developed by IU, currently includes more than 15,500 documents supporting more than 100 distinct IT-related services. Answer documents are retrieved on the web more than 17,719,000 times a year – that is, once every 1.8 seconds. The KB has been recognized with awards from EDUCAUSE, ACUTA, and The Society for Technical Communication, and commendations from Scientific American, PC World, USA Today, Windows Magazine, and Netscape for its pioneering functionality and effectiveness in information management and delivery. Partners in the Kuali IT Support project will benefit from these experiences and access to this content and expertise.

Future phases of this open community development project will focus on additional modules for online support and may address services such as online software distribution, IT systems status notifications, IT facility management, service desk ticketing and integration, and network access management. Additionally, the partners believe delivering support to the higher education community through this endeavor could eventually lead to use beyond information management and into disciplines other than IT support.

For further information about the Kuali community and how it works, see www.kuali.org.

Contact:

Sue B. Workman

Associate Vice President, Communication and Support

Indiana University

sbworkma@iu.edu

(812) 855-0913

Kuali.org News: Call for Partners on Kuali IT Support Project

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:06:39 -0500

Posted:

Mar 03, 2010

Indiana University and the University of Hawaii are inviting partners to join them to develop Kuali IT Support, a new incubation project envisioned to offer a set of components that will provide more effective solutions for IT support in higher education while significantly lower costs and increasing capacity. The first phase of this project will focus on building a knowledge management system (KMS), which leverages IU’s award-winning Knowledge Base (http://kb.iu.edu) and extends it into a next-generation collaborative system that shares not only code, but also content among institutions. The KMS will leverage the deep understanding that the project’s partners have about their own institutions’ services, and deliver that expert information in the exact form and format that their communities need.

Additionally, the partners believe delivering support to the higher education community through this endeavor could eventually lead to use beyond information management and into disciplines other than IT support.

To find out more about this opportunity, see http://kb.iu.edu/data/azgk.html and contact Sue Workman at sbworkma@indiana.edu.

Kuali Jobs: NPS Seeking Java Developer/Systems Analyst

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 14:49:48 -0500

Posted:

Feb 28, 2010

POSITION: Java Developer/Systems Analyst

CLOSING DATE: 15 March 2010 (Priority Screening begins 8 March 2010)

LOCATION: Information Technology & Communication Services Department, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA 93943-5000

ABOUT US: Information Technology & Communication Services (ITACS) is central to the mission of the Naval Postgraduate School in every dimension: research, education, and service to the Navy and the Department of Defense. Whether in the areas of academic applications and service, administrative systems, or network infrastructure, the university community depends upon ITACS to provide an environment that energizes learning and the technology that supports a culture of innovation for our faculty and students.

ABOUT THE POSITION: The Java Developer/Systems Analyst designs, implements, and maintains multi-user Java web applications that meet the business requirements of client organizations, are accessible to authorized customers and are kept up-to-date. Additionally, the position serves as a systems analyst who defines and validates the need for new systems, as well as translates functional requirements into design specifications to meet the needs of functional customers. For a detailed job description, please contact Elisabeth Ramirez-Fagan (contact information provided below). A competitive salary, with an excellent benefits package, is available.

Specific experience and skills include:

Strong object-oriented analysis and design skills
Excellent Java platform experience and knowledge including Java, J2EE, Spring, Application/Web Servers (Apache, Tomcat), Multithreading
Excellent programming language skills including 2 years of experience with Java
Excellent analysis/design/development/testing experience including Design Reviews, Code Reviews, Test Plans, UML, Design Patterns
Experience with at least one ORM technology (JPA, OJB, toplink, EJB, etc.) and JDBC
Experience with more than one MVC framework: Struts, Spring MVC, JSF, etc.
Knowledge of SQL and experience with more than one of the following databases: Oracle, MySQL, or MS SQL
Experience with more than one view technology: Velocity, JSP, or XSL
Familiarity working in Java development environment. This includes using source control, an IDE, and Maven/Maven2 or Ant builds.
Ability to independently organize and manage time effectively to meet goals of software delivery. Manage multiple tasks; ability to independently meet deadlines and maintain high level of productivity.

Applicants must be U.S. Citizens and posses a BS degree in computer science, information technology or a related field from an accredited university. Veterans Preference applies.

APPLICANTS SHOULD ADDRESS THE FOLLOWING IN THEIR APPLICATION MATERIAL:

Professional knowledge, expertise and how the experience was acquired, as it relates to performing the duties of a Java Developer and systems analyst. We are looking for applicants with programming skills in Java.

APPLICANTS SHOULD SEND A COVER LETTER EXPRESSING THEIR INTEREST IN THE POSITION, ALONG WITH THEIR RESUME, TO:

itp@nps.edu

All Resumes should be received by 15 March 2010 in order to be considered (priority screening begins on 8 March 2010).

The Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Member Liaison Blog: New Kuali Infrastructure

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:47:00 -0500

Since Kuali Days last November, the Kuali Foundation staff has been working overtime on a set of new infrastructure that will have a very positive impact on Kuali's collaboration environment. Next week, everybody who has an account on a Kuali system (e.g. Confluence, Sakai, Jira, SVN) will receive the first of a series of emails with important information and action items that will help the community through these changes. Please pay close attention to these emails so that you can continue to use Kuali's tools without any disruption of service. To be sure not to miss any important communications from the Kuali Foundation, I recommend that you add an email filter to prevent anything sent from @kuali.org from going into your spam box.

In this blog post, I will provide a high-level overview of some of the new infrastructure and our migration plan.

The heart of our new infrastructure is what we are calling Kuali Information System (KIS), which serves a number of functions. KIS is a web-based directory where you can find contact information for people associated with Kuali, explore the project teams of the various Kuali Projects, find Collaboration and Contribution groups to work with, manage your own contact information, discover new resources, and request additional access to Kuali resources. Kuali team leads can manage their team members through KIS.

In addition, KIS is responsible for the identity management tasks necessary to implement Single Sign-On, probably our community's most desired functionality. KIS gathers data from Kuali's systems like Jira, Sakai and Confluence, and uses heuristics to reconcile user accounts from these different systems into a single user account. In other words, KIS maps your various user accounts to a single user ID and password, an essential step in setting up Single Sign-On.

KIS also pushes data out to an LDAP server. Shortly, you will be able to easily configure a connection to Kuali's LDAP server through your Mail client (e.g. Microsoft Outlook, Mail.app), which will allow you to look-up Kuali people directly through your email program.

Lastly, KIS pushes Kuali's teams and team members to Kuali's Google Apps account, which includes sophisticated email, grouping, calendaring, document sharing, code review, site creation tools and more. Although new Kuali projects, as well as Collaboration and Contribution teams, may start using this new infrastructure right away, existing projects will likely take some time, working with the Foundation to create a migration plan that does not adversely impact their development schedule.

We are very excited to start using our new infrastructure. The first step, which we will take next week, will be to ask all Kuali account holders to log-in to KIS and create their Single Sign-On password. We will give the community a few weeks to do this before we move any resources behind Single Sign-On.

Throughout the Spring, we will move our resources behind Single Sign-On one-by-one.

At the same time, we will be making minor changes that will be communicated, including changing a number of the listserv email addresses to follow a standardized naming convention.

Please keep your eyes peeled for our forthcoming communications! I encourage you to leave feedback in the comments below, or to contact me directly.

Kuali Foundation Communications: Register for Spring 2010 Workshop

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:14:47 -0500

Posted:

Feb 26, 2010

Registration is now open for Kuali's 2010 Spring Workshop at Colorado State University in May.

Please see our 2010 Spring Workshop WIki page for details about registration, a look at the tentative schedule, and a link to reserve your hotel room at the group rate.

Not sure if you should go to this event? Be sure to check with your Kuali team lead!

Kuali.org News: Florida State University Announcement

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:17:06 -0500

Posted:

Feb 26, 2010

The Kuali Community would like to share the following announcement, prepared by Florida State University.

Florida State University (FSU) signed on as a Founder of the Kuali Student System (KS) project in July 2007. We joined the consortium because the functional vision underlying the KS initiative is the right one for FSU and for higher education more broadly.

During the last year or so, the global financial crisis has had a profound effect on the state of Florida, resulting in massive funding cuts to FSU. We are now faced with budget reductions that compel us to focus our scarce resources on sustaining the operational base of our university’s information systems. The financial capacity to continue contributing to Kuali Student has vanished. Regrettably, we have no alternative but to withdraw our participation in the KS initiative, effective June 2010.

We will continue to follow the Kuali Student project and wish the KS team every possible success. FSU looks forward to the possibility of adopting one or more modules of the system in the future.