QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER

June 2010

INTRODUCTION

The Kuali Spring Workshop 2010 in Ft. Collins, Colorado was a great success with 251 attendees and lots of work accomplished. In addition to the many meetings for project Boards, Functional Councils, Developers, and SMEs, Kuali Coeus (KC) kicked off their IRB tester training and Kuali Rice held a combined ARC/TRC meeting on key roadmap priorities. Celebrations were also in swing for the milestone KC 2.0 release and Kuali HR/Payroll created detailed plans for an initial deliverable.

NEW INVESTORS AND MEMBERS

New Members
Since our last published newsletter, we have added eight new members to the Kuali community. California State University, Office of the Chancellor and Tufts University are new investing partners in Kuali Ready and Duke University, University of Florida, North Carolina State University, Lehigh University, University of Chicago, and University of Pennsylvania are investing partners in Kuali OLE. We welcome all of these new members of Kuali!

Indiana University (IU) Becomes Investing Partner in Kuali Student Project
Indiana University, a founder in the Kuali community five years ago, has expanded its involvement by joining the Kuali Student (KS) initiative as an investing partner. See more at http://kuali.org/node/340.

KUALI PROJECT UPDATES

Kuali Coeus
The Kuali Coeus (KC) project is pleased to announce the release of Kuali Coeus 2.0.  This release includes both new functionality – the Award module - and additional functionality for the Proposal Development module. This release kicks off a number of implementations by partner schools in 2010, including Colorado State University, Indiana University, Cornell University, Michigan State University (pending funding approval), Iowa State University, the University of Arizona, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of California, Berkeley. See more at http://kuali.org/node/339.

On the heels of the milestone release of KC 2.0 on May 14th, 2010, the KC team is now focused on efforts to reach functional equivalency with Coeus 4.5 by the end of calendar year 2011.  The Coeus and Kuali Coeus communities have come together to work collaboratively toward this objective by comparing the applications, identifying the gaps, and defining the required specifications.  Development is underway on many of the gap features for Award, Budget, and Proposal Development.  It has been a complete team effort!    

Near future plans call for the release of KC 3.0 which will provide the Institutional Review Board (IRB) functionality in October 2010, closely followed by the KC 3.1 release in January 2011 providing functionality equivalent with Coeus 4.5 for the Award, Budget, and Proposal Development modules.  As for the ultimate objective, the Kuali Coeus team expects to deliver KC 5.0, fully equivalent to Coeus 4.5 for all modules, by the end of calendar year 2011.   These are indeed eventful days for the KC project!

Kuali Student
The Kuali Student Program (KS) released an initial version of the Curriculum Management (CM) module (Release 1.0) on May 15, 2010. The Founder’s Release comprises all of the business functionality and SOA software infrastructure to make possible the online creation, modification, approval, and retirement of courses. All KS business functionality is enabled by the Kuali Rice infrastructure services including identity services (KIM), the enterprise workflow engine (KEW) and new Business Rules Management services.  These infrastructure services will combine to make this and future Kuali Student modules highly configurable to match local business requirements.

In the Fall of 2010, Kuali Student will issue its first public software release of the Curriculum Management module (Release 1.1) with all of the capabilities described above for both courses and programs.

A Message from the Kuali Student Board Chair
Since the inception of Kuali Student, Cath Fairlie has provided outstanding leadership to our project in her role as Program Director. Cath did most of the heavy lifting in the early days of planning and preparing to launch the project and was instrumental in securing the $2.5M grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation in October 2007. The KS Board had always hoped that Cath would remain with KS until we completed our first software release, and we are delighted that she was able to do so. However, we are now at a transition point and Cath has expressed her wish to move on to other challenges.  

Please join me in welcoming Dan McDevitt, of Indiana University, as the new Program Director of Kuali Student! Dan comes to us with deep and long-standing experience in large application development and implementation projects at IU. Dan will be spending a great deal of time with Cath over the next 6 weeks to ensure a smooth transition. Our goal is to make the leadership handover on July 1st as effective as possible.

Kuali Rice
Kuali Rice released version 1.0.2 on May 14th. This version included a few new pieces of functionality, including the ability to implement custom statuses on workflow documents as well as providing a way to link documents together.  It also included improvements to the Rice configuration system as well as numerous bug fixes. See more at http://kuali.org/node/337.

In parallel with development of the recently released 1.0.2 version, the Kuali Rice team is continuing to forge ahead with development of version 1.1.  Recent discussions within the Application and Technology Roadmap Committees of Kuali Rice have resulted in some reorganization of the deliverables for this version of Rice. Difficulties integrating support for the Java Persistence API (JPA) with the Kuali Nervous System architecture caused the roadmap committees to drop this from the 1.1 scope. Moving forward, the main priority of Kuali Rice 1.1 continues to be middleware version compatibility.  Once implemented, this will allow for older Kuali Rice client applications to interact successfully with a newer version of the Kuali Rice Standalone Server, a crucial feature for Kuali application projects to be written using different versions of Kuali Rice.  Additionally, it should help prevent "forced-march" upgrades for institutions with Kuali Rice implementations that include integration with numerous client applications.

Kuali Ready
This quarter has been very exciting for Kuali Ready - their community-hosted, Above Campus Service continuity planning tool is taking off! They successfully launched the hosted software-as-a-service to their founding partners on April 1st and already have eight instances up and running, with another six orders in the queue. In addition, at the Spring Workshop the Ready Board voted to open up subscriptions to any Kuali Foundation member and to select early adopters, so if you are interested in signing up or would like more information about the tool, please visit our page at http://kuali.org/ready.

Kuali Open Library Environment
In mid-April, Kuali OLE received matching fund contributions from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and began revising their overall timeline based on this milestone. The overall release cycle for Kuali OLE will now run July 2010-July 2012 with a first round test release in July 2011 and a release of Kuali OLE 1.0 scheduled for July 2012. Additionally, Brad Wheeler (Indiana University) and Deborah Jakubs (Duke University) were named as co-chairs of the OLE board, Robert McDonald (Indiana University) was named Kuali OLE Executive Director and Mike Winkler (University of Pennsylvania) was named the Kuali OLE Functional Council Chair. SME teams are also forming.

Currently Kuali OLE is seeking a lead architect and they will continue to post job advertisements for core team vacancies as they become available on the Kuali Foundation site. The Kuali OLE team will be posting positions for a data architect, a configuration/quality assurance manager and a lead developer in the near future.

Kuali Financial System
The Kuali Financial System project is in full steam for the KFS 4.0 release expected in late October 2010, which includes the new Endowment Module for managing endowment funds and their corresponding investments. This management will include a means to account for the investments, investment transactions, obligations, and the underlying funds to which those assets and liabilities belong.  This release will also include interfaces between Kuali Coeus and the Kuali Financial System that will automatically create Account and Budget Adjustment documents for Coeus Awards.   

Additionally, several partner institutions are contributing code back to the project for either enhancements or bug fixes.   This is very exciting as the project continues to formalize the contribution process to maximize and manage the adoption and application of community contributed code.

COMMERCIAL AFFILIATE PROFILE

Syntel is a global provider of Information Technology and Knowledge Process Services founded in 1980 in Troy, Michigan and listed on the NASDAQ in 1997 (SYNT). Revenues in 2009 were $419 Million with 14,000+ global employees and a market capitalization of ~$1.5 Billion. Syntel has been a Kuali Commercial Affiliate since 2007 and they established a Higher Education Center of Excellence (COE) to support the relationship with Kuali and develop functional and technical expertise on KFS and Rice. The team developed reusable assets, methodologies, tools, enhancements and accelerators to help clients manage their Kuali ecosystem including:

• Automated Testing of KFS using Syntel iTAP (integrated Test Accelerator Platform)
• Data Migration Workbench (Open Source Jasper ETL)
• KFS Reporting (Open Source Jasper Reports)
• Active Directory Integration (KFS user management) and Customized User Interface

Syntel offers services to manage the lifecycle of Kuali projects covering implementation (system implementation, customization, development, testing and migration) and maintenance (application support, upgrades and enhancements). 
Visit http://www.syntelinc.com/Industries.aspx?id=54 for additional information or contact Syntel at Sameer_Arora@Syntelinc.com.

QUARTERLY NEWS UPDATE

Kuali Foundation Receives Leveraging Excellence Award for 2010 from NCCI
The National Consortium for Continuous Improvement has honored the Kuali Foundation with the Leveraging Excellence Award for 2010. The Kuali Foundation joins MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service as the 2010 winners. See more at http://kuali.org/node/325.

Kuali Days 2010 Planning Underway
Kymber Horn (The University of Arizona) and Aaron Godert (Cornell University) have accepted the Conference Chair and Vice Chair roles for the next Kuali Days Conference and the conference committee has been meeting regularly. Starting this year, the Conference Committee will run a Call for Proposals, opening up the process to allow anyone to submit a presentation for consideration (open is inevitable!). More information is available at http://kuali.org/kd.

New job postings for the Kuali community
Our community is growing! Since the last quarterly newsletter, Boston University posted four positions for their KC implementation team, UWV is looking for a KC developer, and OLE posted for a new project manager. See the Kuali Insider feed for more information on these opportunities.  Are you looking to hire people for your Kuali implementation? Send your job announcement to help@kuali.org and ask the Kuali Foundation to post it to the Kuali website.

Continual improvements to Kuali’s collaboration infrastructure
As of May 15th, the Kuali community can now use one username and password for KIS, Jira, and Confluence. See more at http://kuali.org/node/325. On June 12th, Jira was upgraded to version 4.1 adding many new improvements.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Kuali Days 2010
November 8-10, 2010
Manchester Grand Hyatt, San Diego, CA
http://kuali.org/kd

EUNIS 2010
June 22-25, 2010
Warsaw, Poland
http://www.eunis.pl/

Advance CAMP: The Second Identity Services Summit
June 23-25, 2010
Raleigh, North Carolina
https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/ACAMPIdSummit2010/Home  

NCCI 2010
July 21-24, 2010
San Francisco, CA
http://bit.ly/bea0PV

NACUBO 2010 Annual Meeting
July 24-27, 2010
San Francisco, CA
http://www.nacuboannualmeeting.org/  

CACUBO Annual Meeting 2010
October 3-5, 2010
Indianapolis, IN
http://www.cacubo.org/announcements/Annual%20Meeting/index.html  

EDUCAUSE 2010
October 12-15, 2010
Anaheim, CA
http://net.educause.edu/e10