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.

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.

Publication of Anna-Louise Jackson's insightful article, "Going for the Bold" (Business Officer Magazine, February 2010), confirms what the Kuali Community has long contended—that collaboratively developed administrative software provides enormous benefit to higher education institutions of all types and sizes.

Here's some more info on one of my favorite features in the Kuali Financial System—global e-docs. I told you about the Account Global document last time I posted. This time I'll introduce Account Delegate Global.

Account delegates are KFS users that are authorized under certain circumstances to take workflow actions on a document in the place of an account's fiscal officer. The Account Delegate Global document allows users to create delegates for multiple document types on one or more accounts on a single document. Like other global documents, it's quite a time saver.

Before being introduced to the Kuali Financial System, I'd never worked on a financial application that provided a global change feature. When I saw global e-docs in KFS for the first time and realized what a time saver they are, I felt like saying, "Where have you been all my life?" This functionality remains one of the things I like best about the KFS, so if you're unfamiliar with global e-docs, I'm happy to have this chance to introduce you.

One of the batch jobs that was used often during development was the ClearCacheJob. However, just prior to 3.0 release it was removed from the default list of jobs. For some schools, it's still a nice job to have around.

Please note that this batch job is not perfect. Even though it would seem from the name that it should clear all the caches, in reality it does not and what it does clear out is sometimes inconsistent. So use it carefully and if all else fails, restart the application server.

To turn the ClearCacheJob back on, in your spring-sys.xml file make the following changes (either add the values to the lists, or even better, add this code directly to your own version of spring-sys.xml so you don't change any core code):

Each year at Kuali Days, a pre-conference session introduces newcomers to the Kuali Financial System. Having videotaped this session at Kuali Days VIII in November 2009, we've now posted part of it on YouTube in a series of videos. While the camera work is hardly professional, anyone who is new to the Kuali Financial System will find these videos very valuable.

The session consists of several different segments, each of which introduces a key aspect of the system and is presented by one or more Kuali Financial System experts.

(Note: Due to size restrictions on YouTube, each segment is made up of two or more video clips.The links below take you to the playlist for each segment.)

If you'd like more details about Colorado State University's experience in going live with the Kuali Financial System, you'll want to watch four videos we've just posted on YouTube. Recorded at Kuali Days 2009, the videos feature Patrick Burns, CSU's Chief Information Officer, and John Hunter, CSU's Accounting Manager Financial Systems Services. Here are the appropriate links:

Part 1 and part 2 (Patrick Burns)

Part 3 and part 4 (John Hunter)

While attending Kuali Days 2009 last month, I borrowed a co-worker's video camera and taped a few key presentations. Now, during the holiday lull, I'm posting some of them on YouTube. One of the pre-conference sessions, "Kuali Financial System Basics," includes an excellent introduction to the system by David Lyons, NACUBO Liaison to the Kuali Foundation. To view Dave's presentation, click the following links:

Sharon Antonucci (a project manager here at rSmart) and I had a conversation not long ago about how the Kuali Financial System (KFS) can be configured to meet the special reporting needs of community colleges. We were discussing one of our clients in particular—San Joaquin Delta College. Like many other community colleges, Delta has special reporting needs that relate to items on the state budget. Briefly, they are required to track the source of all funds and display the information in a check register report that is sent to the county.

As a Kuali Days VIII attendee, I just received the following info from Scott Shepherd by way of followup. If you're interested in the Kuali Student System, you may want to know about the links Scott mentions. He says:

Kuali Student conference session materials are already available at http://kuali.org/files/schedule/schedule.xml. Additional materials, including the demo video and audio, will be made available in coming weeks. Please follow the Kuali Student Reporter (http://blog.student.kuali.net/) for updates on these materials and other news related to Kuali Student.

Jonny Brown
Sr. Information Architect
rSmart