Newsletter - December 2008 | Kuali Foundation

Newsletter - December 2008

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1. From the Executive Director

Greetings to the Kuali Community:

As we end the year 2008, it is time to reflect on all our accomplishments. This year has seen tremendous growth in the Kuali community, with new members, new commercial affiliates, and new investing partners. Significant progress has been made on all the projects, with releases continuing to be delivered, and with many implementations underway by both partner and non-partner schools. Articles in this newsletter reflect that growth, with additional new partners, a new web site, the formalization of the Rice project, the naming of a Kuali Configuration Manager, and certainly the huge success of our Kuali Days VII conference in November. We look forward to an even more exciting year in 2009!

I have had some feedback regarding the distribution of this newsletter, and I will continue to find ways to make this easier to distribute and use. Your contributions are also welcome, so please feel free to send me articles and information for future communications.

If you are interested in keeping up to date on what's happening on a regular basis, visit www.kuali.org, and also see my Kuali Executive Director blog at http://kualied.blogspot.com/

Best regards and Happy Holidays!

Jennifer Foutty
Executive Director, Kuali Foundation
jfoutty@kuali.org
812-345-3948
www.kuali.org

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2. Kuali Coeus Release 1.1 Delivered November 2008

Kuali Coeus 1.1 for Research Administration was delivered on schedule in November 2008. This release delivered enhanced functionality in the budget user interface to better meet faculty needs. Faculty input was important in the delivery of the proposal development release for Kuali Coeus and this release 1.1 addresses input received from faculty at partner institutions. The partners developing this system are: Colorado State University, Cornell University and the Weill College of Medicine, Indiana University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan State University, University of California Davis, University of Arizona, and the Coeus Consortium.

Future modules for Kuali Coeus include: Awards, Institutional Review Board (IRB) for Human Subjects, and Conflict of Interest. See the web site for further details about all the modules and the timeline.

There is still time for new investing partners to join in the development of this project! Contact Jennifer Foutty, Executive Director at jfoutty@kuali.org.

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3. Kuali Days VII a Huge Success!

The November 2008 Kuali Days VII conference was a huge success. It continued the tradition of a comprehensive, multi-track Kuali conference. It included tracks for financial systems, research administration systems, student systems, and Rice, which is the technical infrastructure and middleware component of Kuali. More than 520 university and business representatives from 85 organizations, representing 24 U.S. states and 7 countries attended the conference. There was an energetic spirit and a "buzz" at the conference that invigorated both attendees and presenters. Feedback on surveys about the conference has been very positive. One attendee said "The conference was very informative. We were all exhausted when we got home because our brains had been pushed to the limit with information! Well done!"

Diana Oblinger, the CEO of EDUCAUSE was the keynote speaker. Dr. Oblinger spoke about openness and collaboration as fundamental values of higher education, and the importance of unfettered intellectual exchange using technologies, applications, and approaches that foster sharing and open access to knowledge and resources.

"In just four years, colleges and universities have unlocked the value of our ability to develop enterprise-scale administrative systems together. This participative approach for software-producing and software-consuming institutions will reduce the cost of expensive administrative systems and improve their fit for higher education" said Brad Wheeler, Chairman of the Kuali Foundation Board and Indiana University CIO. "This was the largest Kuali gathering yet as over 80 institutions came to assess the Kuali path or to refine their implementation planning."

Presentations from Kuali Days can be downloaded on the Kuali web site at www.kuali.org.

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4. New Investing Partners in Kuali

Since our last newsletter, five additional educational institutions have joined the Kuali community as investing partners. The University of Washington has become a major new investing partner in the Kuali Student System and in Kuali Rice. Iowa State University has become a new investing partner in both Kuali Coeus and Kuali Rice. The University of California, San Diego has joined the Kuali Foundation as an investing partner in Kuali Rice. Carnegie Mellon University, who was already involved with the Kuali Student project, has now become an investing partner in that project. The University of California Berkeley, who was already a founding partner in Kuali Student, has also become an investing partner in Kuali Coeus.

"I am thrilled that the University of Washington has seized this unique opportunity to join Kuali Student as a Founding Partner, "said Todd Mildon, University Registrar, University of Washington." We believe that Kuali presents us with a deeply compelling strategy for transforming the way we help students plan and pursue their course of learning at UW. Equally important, we believe that the community-source development approach will similarly transform the way UW envisions, creates, and constantly improves its vital core systems."

Iowa State's Dr. Ted Okiishi, Interim Vice President for Research and Economic Development said "I can think of no better way to create software systems for university administration than by leveraging the skills, knowledge, and experience of leading universities. The collaborative efforts of the Kuali partners to implement best practices in university administration using state-of-the-art information technology will greatly benefit the entire higher education community."

"Key for Carnegie Mellon is the fact that the Kuali Student System is being developed by a partnership of schools devoted to new, more flexible designs for both business processes and technology. It's a good example of why collaborative effort by and for higher education will make a difference in enterprise systems," said Joel M. Smith, Vice Provost and CIO of Carnegie Mellon University.

The community is very excited having these new partners on board. For other universities who wish to become partners in one or more of the projects, please contact Jennifer Foutty, Executive Director, at jfoutty@kuali.org. There are opportunities now for schools to become partners and to have influence in the future direction of these projects.

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5. Kuali Welcomes a New Commercial Affiliate – VivanTech

We welcome a new Commercial Affiliate to the Kuali Foundation: VivanTech. VivanTech brings expertise in developing custom financial information systems and has been assisting Kuali partners in their implementation planning and assessment for KFS migration projects. Recently, VivanTech developed Java code to implement a field definition and data mapping tool for KFS.

Randy Ozden, CEO of VivanTech, said "VivanTech's expertise aligns perfectly with our customers' needs. We are supporting and growing with the Kuali community in the form of strategic planning, project management and Java development, which we deliver through our widespread resources, on-campus, off-campus, and offshore. Kuali presents a fantastic opportunity for the higher education community around the world and we are excited to continue building partnerships."

We welcome VivanTech to the Kuali Community as a Kuali Commercial Affiliate!

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6. New Board Members on EDUCAUSE

Two Kuali Foundation leaders have joined the Board of EDUCAUSE. Brad Wheeler, the Chair of the Kuali Foundation Board, and Ted Dodds, the Chair of the Kuali Student Board and member of the Kuali Foundation Board, have been named as Board Members of EDUCAUSE and their terms will start on January 1, 2009.

Ted Dodds was elected to a four-year term by the EDUCAUSE community; for more information, please see: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EQM08414.pdf

Brad Wheeler was appointed by the EDUCAUSE Board. EDUCAUSE CEO Diana Oblinger said, "Brad will bring to the board fresh perspectives and broad experience in the higher education IT community. As EDUCAUSE advances its strategic directions in 2009 and beyond, Brad's thought leadership and ability to deal with complex issues will be a real asset in guiding the association as it meets members' needs."

The Kuali community recognizes the value of having this connection between our community and EDUCAUSE.

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7. New Web Site for www.kuali.org

In early October, we launched our new Kuali web site! We have received much good feedback on the fresh new design and a more user-friendly interface. We still welcome your comments and feedback about the new site as we continuously improve it.

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8. Investing Partners and New Board for Rice Project

We are pleased to announce that we have investing partners in the Rice Project, and have convened a Board for the project to oversee its growth. The investing partners are: University of California San Diego, University of Washington, Iowa State University, the University of Arizona, the University of Maryland, Indiana University and Cornell University.

The commitment to Rice is critical to the Kuali community and its projects, as the technical infrastructure and middleware evolves to serve all current and future projects, and provides a framework for application development beyond the designated Kuali systems.

Eric Westfall, Indiana University, has been named as Project Manager of the Rice Project starting January 1, 2009. Release 1.0 of Rice is expected to be delivered in Spring 2009.

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9. Three KFS partners Implementing on July 1, 2009

Three Kuali Foundation partner schools plan to implement the Kuali Financial System (KFS) 3.0 on July 1, 2009. The University of Arizona, San Joaquin Delta College, and Colorado State University are currently underway with their implementation processes for a go-live date of July 1, 2009.

The KFS community has made a significant team commitment to support these 3 implementations. Because of the community focus of the Kuali Foundation projects, the KFS leadership is in a unique situation to be able to devote the full resources of the Kuali KFS team to our colleagues at these 3 implementing schools.

The Kuali Financial System Project Board is taking this special action because of the confluence of activities and timing surrounding the release of KFS 3.0 in spring and the subsequent go-live dates of 3 large partner schools only a couple of months later. Because of this special situation, the community is rallying around those schools.

The 3 implementing partner schools are solidly recognizing the importance of this course of action by the KFS team and know that the community approach fostered by Kuali is an invaluable asset to their own institutional strategies.

Lee Belarmino, Vice President of Information Technology at San Joaquin Delta College said, "It is humbling to have our major university partners rally to the needs of a single community college. This is but one example of the kind of spirit and equality demonstrated by our partner schools during the last 3 years while developing KFS. I truly believe that KFS will meet the needs of many community colleges in the future and to think it will be just a download away".

Michele Norin, CIO at University of Arizona commented on the community support. She said, "The University of Arizona is proud to be one of the first to implement the new KFS 3.0 software. Having the community rally around us to help ensure success is extremely valuable as we navigate the unchartered territory. This truly is a demonstration of what community source means and we are deeply appreciative."

The KFS 3.0 release components are already being made available to all KFS partner schools, and other implementations are underway as well. Because all efforts are focused on these implementations, the 3.0 release will be made available to the public for downloading after July 1, 2009, when the 3 partner schools are live.

"The wide ranging acceptance of Kuali's KFS proves the viability of community source solutions within higher education in solving our operational challenges in today's market place. With software that has been developed by higher education for higher education, Colorado State University has been able to engage in the project and plans to implement all within 18 months. An institution of our size would normally take at least twice that time to fully integrate such a change into our operating environment," commented Troy Fluharty, the Director of Financial Systems Services at CSU.

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10. Feature Article on Commercial Affiliates: Sun Microsystems
By Jay Visvanathan, Sun Microsystems

rSmart and Sun Microsystems, Inc. Collaborate on KFS Reference Implementation Sun and rSmart are working together to develop Kuali solutions certified to run on Sun systems and open source infrastructure software, including Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS), MySQL, GlassFish, OpenSSO and OpenESB. Working together, Sun and rSmart have installed a nine server reference stack that shows the power and flexibility of Sun hardware and software in combination with the Kuali architecture. Sun has provided rSmart with the necessary server and storage infrastructure to support the development, porting, testing and tuning activities. Both companies are also contributing resources to these activities to provide the first certified and supported Kuali solutions. rSmart and Sun Microsystems, Inc. have completed the deployment of the Kuali Financial System on GlassFish, MySQL, Solaris, and Sun x64 systems. The lessons learned during this project are being captured for a joint Sun and rSmart Kuali Financial System Implementation White Paper to be published in the next couple months. The next phase of the project will involve running performance tests based on the Selenium and Grinder open source platforms as well as deploying KFS on Sun's unique Chip Multithreaded (CMT) microprocessor that executes multiple tasks simultaneously, improving throughput performance without increasing heat production or power consumption. "We are excited to have set up one of the first production-grade environments and being able to give back to the community all that we learn from performance testing," said Tony Potts, CTO, rSmart. Demonstrating its commitment to the education market, Sun Microsystems is collaborating with a number of Kuali Foundation members to support their transformation from legacy mainframe and proprietary applications to SOA. Sun Microsystems is also exploring additional opportunities to contribute resources to the development and integration of existing open source software and industry standards adoption into the Kuali application stack. "We believe that the Kuali open source software combined with the Sun open source software infrastructure provides the best solution," said Keith Rajecki, Global Solutions Architect, Sun Microsystems. "By relying on Sun and rSmart institutions will be able to deploy Kuali open source software to meet their demands for reliability and availability."

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11. Welcome our new Kuali Configuration Manager, Farooq Sadiq

In October, we added an important new colleague to our Kuali team. Farooq Sadiq joined the Kuali Foundation as our Configuration Manager. In that role, Farooq will oversee the technical infrastructure to support the toolset and projects. Farooq has already started to work closely with the Project Managers for all projects, and the development teams and Rice team, to review the current infrastructure and begin defining a plan and process to effect changes that will enhance the services offered.

Farooq works out of his home base at the University of Arizona, and he is doing an excellent job of closely collaborating with all the Kuali teams located throughout North America.

Farooq brings over ten years of development experience to Kuali. He has been involved in all areas of the project life cycle, including proposal writing, project definition, design and development, project management, database design, performance tuning, automated testing, and implementation.

We welcome Farooq to our team!

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12. Welcome our new Kuali Member Liaison, Scott Cooley

We are pleased to announce that Scott Cooley has been appointed as the Kuali Member Liaison. In this role, Scott will be responsible for being a primary liaison to current and potential members of the Kuali community, including oversight of cross-project internal communications and extending our external outreach.

Scott brings a diversity of expertise and skills to this role. Many in the community already know Scott because he started on the Kuali KFS project in June of 2006 to lead the user documentation effort for the first release of KFS. What was originally envisioned as one short manual evolved into the thousands of pages of user documentation, and the feature-rich online help systems for both KFS and Kuali Coeus.

Scott has a BA in English from Albion College and worked at Michigan State University first as a technical writing consultant and then in MSU's Administrative Information Services leading large software documentation and training projects. Scott will remain based in East Lansing.

Commenting on his new role, Scott said "From the beginning of my involvement with Kuali, I've particularly enjoyed the 'trail blazing' aspect. I believe that a key component to the success of Kuali is exceptional communication - whether in the form of user documentation, conferences, meetings, or Web site information - and I look forward to the challenge of continuing to work hard to ensure this component is in place. I look forward to being the point of contact who can put members in touch with the expertise needed, to continually look for ways to make it easier to find that expertise, and to facilitate the continuous application of our lessons learned."

Scott will begin this new position on January 1, 2009. Please join all of us in welcoming Scott to this position!

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13. Upcoming Events

Enterprise 2009 - The EDUCAUSE Enterprise Information & Technology Conference
May 6-7, 2009
Indianapolis, Indiana
http://net.educause.edu/ent09

JA-SIG Spring Conference
March 1-4, 2009
Dallas, Texas
http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/09spring/index.html

WACUBO 2009 Annual Meeting
May 3-9, 2009
Salt Lake City, UT
http://www.wacubo.org/meet/meet.shtml

NACUBO 2009 Annual Meeting
June 27-30, 2009
Boston, MA
http://www.nacuboannualmeeting.org/nacubo2009/public/enter.aspx

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