Newsletter March 2009

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1. From the Executive Director

The past 3 months have been a time for hunkering down and getting things done. We have set some aggressive deadlines for 2009 for all the projects in the Kuali community, and our focus has been on meeting those expectations.

As most of you already know, we decided not to have a Spring 2009 Kuali Days event. We made this decision for a variety of reasons. The projects needed to focus on their next releases, so we didn't want to ask the key staff to take time to prepare and deliver a conference. Also, we are aware of the economic downturn, which is causing many schools to cut back significantly on travel expenses. Please look for information about a Fall 2009 Kuali Days soon.

We are looking forward to a very busy year. We are hearing from many new schools that one or more Kuali projects may be of interest to them. The teams are delivering releases that are rich in functionality in the next few months. We are also looking at some new projects for the Kuali community.

I recently attended a retreat hosted by the Mellon Foundation to bring together the open source projects they have funded. It was a great opportunity to meet with colleagues from very diverse projects. There are some collaboration possibilities that we will be exploring.

I hope you had a good winter, and are looking forward to a warm and productive spring!

Sincerely,

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

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2. Kuali Welcomes a New Member and a New Commercial Affiliate

We have another new member in the Kuali Community – the University of Virginia. We welcome them and look forward to an ongoing relationship where Kuali can bring value to their strategic direction.

We have a new Kuali Commercial Affiliate (KCA) – Innovativ Consulting Partners. Innovativ approached Kuali about becoming a KCA because they see the value of community source applications for higher education, and they bring a background in enterprise-wide administration system implementations. "Participating as a Kuali Commercial Affiliate allows Innovativ to support this dynamic industry and work with the leaders at the forefront of new technology," said Tony DiSanza, founder of Innovativ Consulting Partners. Initially, Innovativ will be working with the Rice team to provide development and documentation expertise, and later expand to work with other projects.

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3. Kuali and Open Source in the Press

Kuali was featured in the January 2009 issue of the Business Officer magazine, published by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). In an article written by Anna-Louse Jackson entitled "It Takes a Community," the Kuali Financial System's vision and development was described from its ideation in 2004 to its successful development and delivery of multiple releases. The article can be viewed at: http://www.kuali.org/files/pdf/It_Takes_a_Community.pdf

Recently, Bob Violino published an article in CIO Insight about how the open source option has become quite attractive in these economic times. The article can be found at: http://www.kuali.org/press/archives/01302009.html

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4. Updates on the Kuali Projects

The Kuali Financial System (KFS) community has placed release 3.0 into QA this month. It will be delivered as a download to the public soon. Meanwhile, the KFS community is rallying around the partners who are in the process of implementation. Indiana University went live with the General Ledger and Labor Ledger last month. Colorado State University and San Joaquin Delta Community College plan to go live with the full KFS system on July 1, 2009. The University of Arizona plans to go live with the full system at the end of the year. Other schools and partners are also in the implementation process, so within the next few months we'll have much good news about these implementations.

The Kuali Coeus (KC) community has updated the 1.0 release with additional functionality and usability and is available for download now. Release 2.0 is underway and will be delivered later this year. We are working with the current Coeus community to define the process of merging our systems and planning how we will work together in the future. We are getting quite a bit of interest in the Kuali Coeus project from many new schools.

The Kuali Student (KS) community is planning for delivery of release 1.0 later this year. This release will include the Learning Unit Management module for curriculum development. This module demonstrates the approach by the project team to abstract concepts for maximum flexibility – the LUM can be compared to the "SKU" in an inventory system so that it can describe all kinds of learning units, whether those LUMs are traditional semester-long courses or one-time components for a certification. Some partners in KS are planning to implement this release as a first phase to their overall KS implementation.

The Kuali Rice community has formed a new development team. With the new investing partners now in place, we have a development team of about 10 programmers who can make significant progress on Rice initiatives. The Rice release 1.0 will be delivered this Spring and will include all functionality required to support the application releases occurring this year. Release 1.0 will also come with documentation which we recognize has been a gap in beta releases of Rice. The community continues to hear that institutions across the country are downloading and starting to use Rice on their campuses.

NOTICE ABOUT RICE VERSION FOR KFS AND KC: This information will affect those schools who plan on implementing both Kuali Financial System (KFS) release 3.0 and Kuali Coeus (KC) release 1.1 or release 2.0. KFS 3.0 will use Rice 1.0 while KC 1.1.x will use a previous version of Rice. When KC 2.0 is implemented in late Fall 2009, it will jump to Rice release 1.1, while KFS will still be on version 1.0 of Rice. So, there will be incompatibility of Rice versions for KFS and KC until these are brought into synch. The Kuali Rice project has created a compatibility working group and we are looking to target version 1.1 and beyond of Kuali Rice for compatibility between Rice versions. In the meantime, until that process is completed, we may have schools who are running both KFS and KC who will require two Rice instances.

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5. KFS Endowment Management Module Underway

The Kuali Endowment Management (KEM), which is a part of the Kuali Financial System (KFS) project, is underway. This is an important module of the KFS for many schools and Foundations, because endowment funds (and similarly invested long-term funds) and their corresponding investments are key components of the financial structure of most colleges and universities. The KEM system will deliver a means to account for the investments, investment transactions, obligations, and the underlying funds to which those assets and liabilities belong. The KEM system will be based on the functionality of the IU Foundation Endowment and Trust Accounting (ETA) System which will be re-engineered adhering to the Kuali Architecture and Standards.

A project plan is being created which targets a delivery date of July 2010 for the major components of KEM.

Investing partners in KEM are Cornell University and the Indiana University Foundation. Both of these partners are providing critical contributions in resources and cash to ensure a robust and comprehensive KEM for Kuali and its institutions. The project also benefits from the input of subject matter experts from the University of Arizona, San Joaquin Delta Community College, Indiana University and NACUBO. Additional investing partners are still welcome, so if you are interested in finding out more, please contact Norm Peacock, IU Foundation, npeacock@indiana.edu.

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6. Potential New Kuali Projects

There are a couple of potential new Kuali projects on the horizon.

Business Continuity: This is a system for emergency planning on campus. UC Berkeley has developed a system and some institutions are already using it. The project has some investing partners, including higher education and some for art institutions. UC Berkeley's system will be updated into an open source architecture and delivered as a Kuali project. We expect this project to gain approval and kick off soon.

IT Knowledge Management and Support: This is a project that would provide a next-generation knowledge management system (KMS) to provide online self-service IT support 24x7x365, and in later phases may provide additional IT support mechanisms. The knowledge base (KB) of yesterday was about searching for and retrieving what experts had compiled. The knowledge management system of tomorrow is about two-way communication, collaboration, and shared content generation. Along with certifiable expert answers, there is enormous potential for communities to contribute support to each other. This project would be hosted within a community source cloud computing environment dedicated to higher education. KMS may be the first higher education community-source software project to share content as well as code, allowing participating universities to collaborate and leverage resources required to create and maintain information in common. This project is currently looking at scope and possible investing partners, in order to formulate a Charter and the possibility of becoming a Kuali project.

HR/Payroll: This project would provide a system for payroll and human resources in an open source approach. There are several institutions who are in the process of evaluating this potential project, to scope and phase the project, determine resources, and create a Project Charter. Once enough investing partners are committed to this project, we expect to get it underway -- sometime in mid-2009.

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7. Feature Article on Commercial Affiliate: VivanTech

VivanTech Contributes a Sandbox Solution to the Kuali Community.

In support of the Kuali Community, San Diego based VivanTech has developed a Kuali Sandbox, V-KUBE. It is a ready-to-use virtual machine. V-KUBE enables users to run KFS 3.x pre-release build and/or Kuali Coeus, both of which come pre-installed on the virtual machine. V-KUBE is free to the Kuali Higher Education Community.

V-KUBE graphic

V-KUBE is not meant to replace the Kuali Test Drives. Instead, V-KUBE compliments the Test Drives by allowing an organization to move from interest and preliminary research to populating a fully functional Sandbox with university specific data.

Dirk Merkel, CTO at VivanTech, reports, "Through our work with USC and other universities, it has become obvious to us that migration planning is radically enhanced by a local test system. We feel that it should be a part of best practices and to back that up, VivanTech has decided to contribute this sandbox solution to the Kuali community." To ensure success, the company will provide complimentary assistance to universities who want to begin populating a sandbox with their data.

VivanTech is also the builder of a data-mapping tool funded by USC and contributed to the Kuali community. Leadership provided by the KFS team at IU opened the way to development of this robust tool, which will be included in KFS 3.0 and accessible via links under "System -> Administration." Many educational institutions know that field descriptions, field requirements, acceptable values, and other data are required to successfully map and populate the KFS database from their existing financial systems. The Functional Field Description and Data Mapping Field Definition features of the upcoming KFS 3.0 release will greatly simplify this task. VivanTech now has a complete set of tools, including a process and an ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) tool to achieve precise and correct data mapping early in the migration process.

The data-mapping tool in combination with VivanTech's new V-KUBE equips any university for rapid and efficient creation of their first test environment, populated with their own data mapped and transformed to Kuali standards.

VivanTech's expertise aligns perfectly with customer needs. "We are supporting and growing with the Kuali community in the form of strategic planning, project management, and Java development that we deliver through our widespread resources on-campus, off-campus, and offshore," says Randy Ozden, VivanTech CEO.

For additional information, send your inquiries to kuali@vivantech.com or contact Brian Smith at (858) 643-4842 ext. 116.

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8. Job Opening for Kuali Member Liaison

As many of you may know, Scott Cooley has resigned as the Kuali Member Liaison. We wish Scott the best in pursuing new opportunities.

Therefore, we are posting this position. Please make others aware of this job listing as you see fit.

KUALI MEMBER LIAISON:

The Kuali Foundation is a non-profit organization that coordinates the efforts of colleges and universities to sustain and evolve a comprehensive suite of administrative software that meets the needs of all Carnegie Class institutions. The Kuali Foundation began in 2004 as a cooperative effort among seven partners and a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop an open-source, community-owned financial system. Success with joint development of Kuali Financial System has led to three other pooled investment projects, including Kuali Coeus for Research Administration, Kuali Student and Kuali Rice, with coordination by the independent, not-for-profit Kuali Foundation Inc. The software of Kuali projects is freely available under the Educational Community License to anyone for any use or modification without fee. For more information, see www.kuali.org.

Opportunity:
The goal of the Member Liaison is to manage the communications with existing members and new members to ensure the community is well served by all communications, for project issues both functional and technical, and for community-wide issues. The Member Liaison will create and monitor listservs as the Kuali project managers see fit, will ensure that current and new members have access to all communication mechanisms, will oversee the content of web sites to ensure they are up to date, and will work with the project teams and the Executive Director to oversee community lists and communications. The Member Liaison will be available to answer questions about Kuali, the projects, and handle basic troubleshooting questions from members both inside and outside the community.

The ideal candidate for the Member Liaison position will have experience with enterprise applications and a strong familiarity with the Kuali applications, the ability to work as a team member as well as independently, excellent oral and written communication skills, and the ability to handle multiple tasks concurrently.

The Member Liaison reports to the Kuali Foundation Executive Director.

Additional skills and experience:

Experience working with a distributed team is required.
Knowledge of the Kuali enterprise applications is highly desirable.
Excellent communication skills, organization skills, and collaboration skills are required.
Experience with Sakai, Confluence and Jira tools is desirable.
Experience in writing for various constituents, and facilitating meetings, is desirable.

Day-to-day responsibilities:

Engage the community in determining best practices for ongoing communications with all constituents.
Monitor listservs as the project teams and Executive Director see fit, and answer questions about Kuali and the projects posed by members and non-members.
Oversee the Sakai, Confluence and Jira access and groups to ensure members and non-members have appropriate access.
Provide assistance to project teams in communications with constituents.
Ensure all members have the appropriate MoU's, CLAs, and CCLAs on file. Work with the accountant to ensure proper invoicing.
Establish ongoing mechanisms for tracking of communications and effectiveness of those communications and report to the Executive Director.
Prepare materials for Kuali sessions for recruiting new members, and for sharing information about the community.
Facilitate project and team meetings.
Brainstorm with the Executive Director and project boards to enhance ongoing communications internally and externally.

Depending on the circumstances of the successful applicant, this position could be established in a number of ways, including:

an agreement to tender the employee to the Kuali Foundation, if the candidate wishes to remain with his or her institution
as a personal consultancy directly to the Kuali Foundation
other arrangements will be considered

Please send cover letter and resume via e-mail to: Jennifer Foutty, Executive Director, Kuali Foundation Inc., jfoutty@kuali.org

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9. Upcoming Events

NERCOMP – Open Source in Higher Education
March 24, 2009
Amherst, MA
http://www.nercomp.org/events/event_single.aspx?id=1767

EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference 2009
March 23-25, 2009
Chicago, IL
http://net.educause.edu/mwrc09

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

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

10th Sakai Conference
July 8-10, 2009
Boston, Massachusetts
https://educonference.com/sakai/boston/index.php

Kuali Days VIII
Fall 2009 - TBD

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If you would like to unsubscribe from this newsletter, please send a message to Jennifer Foutty at jfoutty@kuali.org and ask to be unsubscribed from the Kuali Newsletter listserv.

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