Kuali Foundation Newsletter June 2009

Jul 30, 2009 — zach

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1. From the Executive Director

A few weeks ago, I celebrated my one-year anniversary as Executive Director of Kuali. What surprises me most is how much we have grown in only one year, both in membership and in the activities and deliverables. As I reflect, I think there have been three key accomplishments during that year:

We created a fully funded project for Rice. One year ago, many partners were concerned because Rice is so essential to all Kuali applications and also as a standalone environment. We were funding it on the margins from resources assigned to the projects and through the good will of a couple of schools. Now, we have 8 investing partners and an ongoing and sustainable project. We have created committees alongside the Rice team to ensure technology evolution over time and integration with the applications.
We created a Sustaining Charter for KFS which can be used as an example for similar sustaining models as other projects deliver releases and need to sustain those systems over time. See an article in this newsletter for more detail.
We have delivered some solid releases with Kuali Financial System, Kuali Coeus, and Rice. And, for Kuali Student we are underway to deliver the release 1.0 early next year.

With the economic downturn, many institutions are seeing Kuali as a new path toward meeting their administrative system needs, by collaborating with others to reduce costs and ensure high quality systems that meet the needs of their institution. Although these are hard times financially for many of our peers, we look forward to the continued growth with Kuali as an option to help mitigate the difficulties.

We have announced our next Kuali Days event, and see the article in this newsletter for more detail.

Sincerely,

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

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2. Kuali Welcomes New Member Liaison – Zach Naiman

In early May we welcomed Zach Naiman as the new Kuali Member Liaison. Zach will be overseeing Kuali communications for internal collaboration and for outreach, and assisting in our use of tools and web sites to better facilitate our activities. Zach comes to us from the University of Arizona where he has been the Kuali Development Manager. Not only does Zach bring excellent organizational and communication skills, he has a sound technical background and understands enterprise systems and the community source approach. He has been a vocal supporter of Kuali. Many of you already know Zach because you've worked with him on various Kuali initiatives. Please join me in welcoming Zach to this new position!

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3. Kuali Days VIII Announced

In May, the Kuali Foundation announced the dates and location for the Kuali Days VIII conference. Kuali Days VIII will be held on November 17 and 18, 2009 in San Antonio, TX. In addition to the Kuali Days VIII conference event, there will be pre-conference sessions, community meetings, and other networking activities.

Once again, there will be multiple tracks available to attendees. The Program Chair and Track Chairs are working diligently on putting together another excellent program. We are doing our best to hold down costs this year to address budget constraints, so we can maximize the ability for community members, project partners, and potential members to attend this event.

More information about the logistics, registration, and conference activities will be published on the web site as they become available.

Look for special member discounts to the conference for members of the Kuali Foundation.

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4. KFS Sustaining Charter Announced

The KFS project has announced its Charter for Sustaining partners, and schools and Commercial Affiliates are starting to sign up. There will be an announcement soon about the new Sustaining Partners for KFS. This is an important milestone for the KFS project, and an example of the commitment to the ongoing sustainability and evolution of these important shared resources. The charter describes how the KFS community will continue the successful community development practices that have led to great software and a repeatable method of evolving it.

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5. Update on Kuali Coeus project

Over the past few months, there has been much activity and momentum on the Kuali Coeus project. A new release 1.1.1 was delivered this spring with additional usability and to address changes with grants.gov. Work is continuing on release 2.0; this release will have 3 major components, which will be released over a period of time as they become available. The Awards module will be released first, in late Fall 2009. Following that, the IRB and the Conflict of Interest modules will be released. Quality Assurance continues to be a focal point and the project has hired a full-time manager for the QA activities. In addition to all of this activity, we have transitioned to a new Project Manager for Kuali Coeus. Andy Slusar moved to a new role with Cornell University to oversee their Kuali Financial System (KFS) implementation and we congratulate him! Andy played a key role in the initial start-up and development of Kuali Coeus as a project and deserves much credit for its success so far.

Our new Kuali Coeus Project Manager is Graham Hall. Graham comes to us from Cornell University where he has been the Technical Manager of their Student PeopleSoft implementation. Graham will be an excellent leader for the KC project into the future! Activity has also continued in our planning with the Coeus Consortium to define how we can work together in the future as the Coeus code base is merged in a couple of years. The sustainability model is important for all Kuali projects and we are working together, with both Kuali and Coeus team members, to define this for the benefit of all member institutions.

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6. KFS 3.0 Delivered to Partner and Member Institutions

The much anticipated Kuali Financial System (KFS) 3.0 has been released to partner schools in May 2009. Indiana University has already implemented KFS 3.0 for the general ledger, labor ledger, and sufficient funds checking modules and will close their books for FY08-09 with the KFS system. Two of the partner schools plan to implement the full KFS 3.0 this summer and others will implement next year. Please look for good news about these implementations soon.

The 3.0 release includes the functionality outlined by the original partners as needed for a comprehensive financial system for higher education. The modules in release 3.0 are: Chart of Accounts, Financial Transactions/General Ledger, Purchasing/Accounts Payable, Labor Ledger, Accounts Receivable, Budget Construction, Capital Asset Management, and Effort Certification. Two components, Year-End Processing and Depreciation, will be delivered a couple of months later so that full testing can be completed after a partner institution closes their books for year-end. The releases are being delivered initially to Kuali members only pending the full packaging, documentation and release management required for a public release. Because the partner institutions' success is the first priority of KFS, we are focusing on applying resources to those successful implementations, and then will focus on preparing the public release for download.

Release 3.0 is not the "end" of the KFS project, however. The Kuali Endowment Module of KFS is planned for delivery in Summer 2010.

Also, see the article in this newsletter about the KFS Sustaining Partnership for more information about the continuation and sustainability of KFS!

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7. Kuali Rice 1.0 to be released

Last fall, a group of investing partners came together around the Rice project, to provide resources and funding to ensure that Rice development continues. This development team has been coming up to speed and working on the current 0.9 Rice release, to enhance it with needed functionality, to provide QA to ensure a fully functioning system, and to create excellent documentation for public release. We are pleased that Rice 1.0 will be delivered in mid-summer 2009 and will be available for download at that time. Rice is also the underlying framework for the Kuali applications, including Kuali Financial System (KFS) 3.0 which will also be delivered in mid-summer 2009, and future releases of Kuali Coeus (KC) and Kuali Student. As with any middleware component, we have challenges in updating Rice and then ensuring the applications are using the most current version. For example, for KC 2.0 which will be delivered in Fall 2009, we will implement a 1.0.x release of Rice which will also be compatible with KFS 3.0.

In addition, the Rice 1.0 release is being used by many partner institutions to do application development at their institutions beyond the Kuali Financial System, Kuali Coeus, and Kuali Student applications.

Rice will continue to be developed and enhanced, as the new investing partners continue to provide a team of resources to ensure ongoing development.

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8. Update on Kuali Student

Kuali Student (KS) continues progress towards releasing the first module of the KS product. The KS project filled out it ranks of Founders and Partners as the Naval Postgraduate School officially joined as a Founder, partnering with San Joaquin Delta College. In other Founder news, the University of Southern California approved a $5 million investment in the KS project, while the University of Washington launched its KS Web pages to communicate the institution's decision to participate in the KS project.

Documentation Available:

With full support from Founders and Partners, KS moves steadily closer to Release 1, Curriculum Management, in March 2010. That progress is reflected in the release of a series of Kuali Student documents, starting with the publishing of a number of service contracts. The contracts, available for public review in the documentation section of the KS Web site, define the integration points between modules and the core infrastructure, and between the modules themselves. There are three classifications of service contracts for the Kuali Student System: Business Services, Infrastructure Services, and Data Management Interfaces. While the public is encouraged to review the documentation, the service contracts are still under development. They are not to be considered final and may be altered without notice.

As the team progresses with the development and testing phase for Curriculum Management, the KS management team has stepped back to review the approach and methodology used to date and reflect on the lessons learned. The goals driving the new methodology are to build on the current distributed collaboration, to become more agile, efficient, reduce hand-offs, and better support multiple parallel teams. This new methodology will be used as the team begins the requirements gathering phase for the second module, Enrollment. The revised methodology will make better use of resources, will make individual institutional requirements more transparent, and will ease collaboration across the various project teams.

Configuration in Kuali Student:

During the Release 1 process, there has been much discussion surrounding configuration, which has been a central goal of KS with emphasis on open standards, service contracts, rules engines and workflow engines. These are accepted practices that experts would agree will be vital to making KS configurable. Less known – and perhaps understood – is Kuali Student's focus on configuration in three other areas:

The use of types to model high level entities such as degree programs, requirements, courses and activities so they can be extended and recombined to handle the newly emerging experiential and project based models of delivering educational content.
The integration of dictionary services that allow for easy configuration of basic information such as the size of a field, cardinalities, labels, validations, and help messages.
The development of a user interface (UI) framework that allows for a declarative configuration of the layout of fields on the screens.

Individually, these modes of configuration are only incremental improvements on past practices. None are radically new concepts. Each makes one mode of configuration easier to do and manage. Taken together, however, these modes create a qualitative change in what it means for a system to be configurable. These modes of configuration result in a playground of building blocks that can be assembled and reassembled as needed. Taken together, these modes of configuration result not in single system for schools to adopt and try to use but an ecosystem where schools can configure and recombine in ways not originally envisioned by any of the founding universities.

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9. Upcoming Elections to the Kuali Foundation Board

During late summer and early fall of this year, we will be filling the Foundation Board seats for those persons ending their term on 12/31/09. To fill these seats, we have appointed a Nominating Committee of 3 members of the Foundation Board who will oversee the process. The seats will be filled in two ways, through appointments and through elections. Sections 6.5 and 6.6 of the bylaws state as follows:

6.5 Elected Board Seats. At least four (4) Board seats will be directly elected by the Kuali Membership, with one (1) of those reserved specifically for Commercial Affiliates (CAs) who are in good standing as Kuali members, although CAs could hold additional elected or appointed seats as well. Anyone can be nominated or self-nominate for these elected seats. Each institutional member's organizational representative, including CAs will have one (1) vote to elect these seats.

6.6 Appointed Board Seats. There will be up to eight (8) seats that may be appointed based on direct recommendation from the Kuali Project Boards. The Nominating Committee will assess the overall blend of Board seats with the goal of ensuring balanced Board membership by institution and role as well as ensuring representation by Kuali Projects -- based on projects' stage and importance of representation to the overall Kuali community. Each year, the Nominating Committee will make a recommendation to the Kuali Foundation Board regarding how many seats should be appointed from names submitted by the Project Boards and how many should be put up for direct election. For those that will be appointed, the Nominating Committee will solicit two to three (2-3) names from the Board of each of the Projects selected for the current election cycle and then submit the recommended slate of appointed members to the Kuali Foundation Board for approval.

We will be facilitating the elections in the next couple of months so more information will be forthcoming, and a specific notification will be sent to the Kuali Foundation voting members so they may cast their vote.

The purpose of this process is to have, to the extent possible, a broad representation from the variety of projects, school types, and constituents of the Foundation.

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10. Feature Article on Commercial Affiliate: Innovativ Consulting Partners

Innovativ Consulting Partners Teams with Kuali for
Rice 1.0 Technical and User Guides
By Mike Calhoun, Partner

Innovativ Consulting Partners, LLC (ICP) joined the Kuali Commercial Affiliate Program in February 2009. We are providing our first contributions to the Kuali community, an extensive package of documentation for the Kuali Rice 1.0.0 Standalone Release. In support of the release ICP will make available on the Kuali web site the Rice 1.0.0:

Installation Guide
Technical Reference Guide
User Guide
Glossary

We are writing these Guides with your users in mind. They can use these Guides and learn to use Rice to work more effectively and efficiently than ever. You'll find these Guides are a major extension beyond the Rice 0.9 documentation in both content and usability.

ICP believes it is strategically important to remove barriers that may exist for your organization in adopting Rice. We are using our expertise to build on the knowledge we're gaining while writing these Guides to develop:

Tools and methodologies to help your organization evaluate and adopt Rice
A variety of delivery options for the Standalone version of Rice
Subscription support services for Rice
Rice training, developed with professional educators and training delivery organizations
A Virtual Machine distribution of Rice

ICP looks forward to our future with Kuali and to many opportunities to contribute to your organization and Kuali's success. We are delighted to serve on the Kuali Rice Board and to demonstrate our firm commitment to furthering the advancement and adoption of Rice and other Kuali projects.

We look forward to meeting you and your team in the months ahead and to contributing to your success with Kuali Rice.

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11. Upcoming Events

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, MA
https://educonference.com/sakai/boston/index.php

Campus Technology 2009
July 27-30, 2009
Boston, MA
http://campustechnology.com/microsites/events/campus-technology-conference.aspx

Kuali Days VIII
November 17-18, 2009
San Antonio, TX
(web site for registration will be available soon)

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