September 2009 Kuali Foundation Newsletter
- From the Executive Director
- Kuali Celebrates 5-Year Anniversary
- KFS 3.0 Implemented at Colorado State University and San Joaquin Delta College
- Kuali Days VIII Program Announced
- Kuali Rice 1.0 Released
- Kuali Roadmap Team
- Kuali Student progresses toward Release 1, Curriculum Management
- Update on Kuali Coeus
- Wow - Look at that Community Support!
- "Kuali Ready" Proposed for Early 2010
- Kuali Uses rSmart Sakai CLE for Collaboration
- Elections to the Kuali Foundation Board
- Feature Article on Commercial Affiliate: IBM
- Kuali Welcomes new Operations Manager
- Activities at EDUCAUSE 2009
- Kuali Job Openings: Lead Technical Architect and Quality Assurance Director
- Upcoming Events
- Unsubscribe from Newsletter
1. From the Executive Director
This has been an interesting summer for higher education. With the economic downturn, many of us have found our budgets cut at levels that we couldn't have imagined.
From one perspective, this is good news, as many Kuali Partner institutions are committed to making the investment up front in the Kuali projects knowing the long-term benefits of choosing this path over others. More schools are becoming interested in Kuali; many of us within the community are contacted routinely by those who are interested in what we are doing. Kuali also continues to have strong interest from commercial partners. The increased interest in Kuali during difficult economic times validates our investment in community source as a cost-effective way of delivering quality systems for higher education.
The bad news is that our ability to travel and collaborate face-to-face has been somewhat diminished as travel budgets are often the first to be slashed. Although the registrations so far for Kuali Days VIII are fairly strong, we recognize the difficulty all of us are having.
Probably the best news coming out of the last quarter, along with the release of Rice 1.0, is the successful implementation of KFS 3.0 at two partner schools: Colorado State University and San Joaquin Delta Community College. They have demonstrated that the Kuali model is successful in delivering enterprise level financial software.
Sincerely,
Jennifer L Foutty, Executive Director
2. Kuali Celebrates 5-Year Anniversary
On August 30, 2004, there appeared in The Chronicle for Higher Education an article written by Jeffrey Young that began: "Frustrated by the high cost of commercial financial-management software, Indiana University and the University of Hawaii are leading an effort to build a free, open-source alternative. The project's leaders say the effort could save colleges millions of dollars." Brad Wheeler celebrated our 5-year anniversary by sending a note to the Kuali community recapping that article (found at: http://chronicle.com/article/Next-Up-for-Open-Source-Fi/10153/) and stating the following:
"Who could have imagined that the "Kuali Project" with the aspirational hope of building an enterprise scale financial system using a new collaborative model would lead to where we are today? It is endearing to think of those who launched the Kuali Community, but it is more profound to think of so many across this community who have turned an interesting idea into a substantial, multi-project reality. The timing of our work for these challenging times for higher education is most profound.
Happy five year birthday to Kuali and all of us!!"
We have come a long way in 5 years! Congratulations to all involved!
3. KFS 3.0 Implemented at Colorado State University and San Joaquin Delta College
We are excited about the first successful full-scale implementations of Kuali Financial System 3.0 by Colorado State University (CSU) and San Joaquin Delta College (SJDC).
Both of these institutions decided that KFS was the right choice for them despite their very different profiles. CSU is a large doctoral-granting research ("R1") university with more than 25,000 graduate and undergraduate students, and more than 1,000 tenure-track faculty who received $312 million in competitive research support in fiscal year 2009. San Joaquin Delta College serves a diverse community of nearly 20,000 students in the Stockton California area, offers a variety of two-year undergraduate degree programs, and focuses on teaching.
The transitions to the new financial system in July have gone smoothly according to campus officials who hail Kuali as a primary example of how institutions can contain costs in higher education through innovation and collaboration.
Dr. Raúl Rodriguez, President of San Joaquin Delta, said "When we looked at KFS, we knew immediately that this was the right decision for Delta College. The money we saved by not buying a proprietary system is money that can now be spent where it belongs - on our students."
The Colorado State University Board of Governors recognized the need for an updated, integrated financial system, and in 2006 they authorized the university to move forward. The cost to purchase an existing, off-the-shelf financial system was projected to be around $5 million to $7 million or more, without the full functionality CSU needed.
Instead, the total cost for CSU's new system and its implementation came to less than $2 million, thanks to the university's willingness to partner with Kuali, according to CSU's Vice President for Information Technology and Interim Dean of Libraries Patrick Burns.
"We were able to implement the state-of-the-art infrastructure for a fraction of the cost of our peers through a partnership with the Kuali Foundation--and thanks to our experience finding innovative ways to deal with limited resources," said Burns.
"This will allow us to manage our finances, where as the old system only recorded our financial transactions," Burns said. "It's software designed by higher education for higher education. And we get a round peg to fit a round hole for a price that is far less costly."
"Controlling costs in higher education isn't just about cutting budgets," CSU President Tony Frank said. "We also need to be increasingly innovative and entrepreneurial in our approach to doing business. This is a great example of what we can achieve by taking such an approach. I think the CSU and Kuali community who worked so hard on this initial launch should be very proud that their work will be a model for other universities around the world."
Congratulations to CSU and SJDC, and the Kuali teams, for their success!
4. Kuali Days VIII Program Announced
In November, we will gather in San Antonio for Kuali Days VIII. Registration is open now - be sure to register before October 5 to take advantage of the early-bird discount. The Program was announced in late August, and the "schedule at a glance" is posted on the web site. See www.kuali.org/kd for all the details. As we get more detail about the sessions and presenters, we'll be posting those as well. Join us on the beautiful Riverwalk in San Antonio for exciting networking, collaboration, and learning about Kuali projects, including past successes, current status, and future plans!
5. Kuali Rice 1.0 Released
Last month, we announced release of Kuali Rice 1.0. Kuali Rice 1.0 serves as the core infrastructure for all Kuali applications including Kuali Financial System 3.0, Kuali Coeus 2.0, and Kuali Student. In addition, Kuali Rice 1.0 provides module functionality that it can be integrated with other institutional applications. Kuali Rice extends community source solutions to provide the capability to integrate with diverse applications, both at the enterprise and departmental level.
Kuali Rice 1.0 is the first release since the Rice project was officially chartered in May 2009.
Elazar Harel, Chief Information Officer, University of California San Diego, and a Kuali Rice Board Member, said "The University of California San Diego became involved in the Rice project because we recognized the value it will bring not only in developing new applications for our institution, but also in knitting together a variety of tools and applications in a common framework. UCSD sees Rice as the future technology infrastructure both for Kuali applications we may deploy and for seamless delivery of a variety of technology services to our students, faculty, and staff."
Kuali Board member Aaron Godert of Cornell University said, "Cornell University has been involved with the Rice project since its inception. We are pleased that so many diverse institutions are now contributing to the project, and are impressed by the hard work and dedication the team put forth to deliver Rice 1.0. We have already realized some benefits of Rice through several custom built applications that leverage its workflow features and application development framework, and are excited to continue leveraging it as a key component of our enterprise software strategy."
We are also in the process of developing an ongoing roadmap for Rice and the technical architecture. See the next article for more details.
6. Kuali Roadmap Team
If Kuali software were a building, Rice would be the foundation. Kuali Rice is an integral part of all the Kuali Applications (KFS, KS, KC) and institutions are beginning to depend on Rice and Kuali Enterprise Workflow (KEW) as a key part of their enterprise architecture.
With its important role in Kuali's success, the Rice team is working hard to develop a clear roadmap for the future that:
- Makes the scope of Rice and its relationship to the Kuali Applications clear
- Clearly lays out the drivers for evolving Rice, and sets expectations for planned future capabilities
- Describes a strategically integrated release cycle that deals with the inter-dependencies between Rice and the Kuali Applications
- Creates a transparent community process for continually adapting the roadmap over time
The Rice board of directors commissioned a joint task force of the Application Roadmap Committee, the Technology Roadmap Committee, and key members of the Rice project team. The task force intends to deliver presentations about the Rice Roadmap and the community process that will evolve it at Kuali Days VIII this year in San Antonio. You can follow the work in progress in the Rice space in Confluence: https://test.kuali.org/confluence/x/_QAuD.
7. Kuali Student progresses toward Release 1, Curriculum Management
The Kuali Student project continues to make steady progress toward Release 1, Curriculum Management, in March 2010. At the core of the Curriculum Management are learning units. A learning unit will act like a SKU (stock-keeping unit) that you find in almost every store. It can be a course; a single lecture in a course; a 15-minute student presentation in a course; or participation in community service. Truly, a learning unit can be any activity that the student wants to include on a formal or co-curricular transcript. We can also have: learning results, learning plans, learning resources.
The learning unit addresses the limitation of current student information systems that model every learning entity into an existing "hard-wired" structure. Learning is fluid and dynamic, and professors at Kuali Student Founder and Partner institutions want to push the boundaries.
In the three years since Richard Spencer, executive director of IT at the University of British Columbia and early advocate of Kuali Student, introduced the concept of learning units to the project, the concept has gone through some birthing pangs. For example, the original concept was for the units to slide up and down a scale from the most general type (i.e. degree programs) to the more specific types (i.e. courses and their activities).
The basic structure of the data dictionary - which manages system information about field names and types - was laid out last July by the Kuali Student service and technical architects. It was designed to allow configuration of objects by both type and state. Business analysts took the abstract structure and used it to flesh out the dictionary with requirements for credit courses at Kuali Reference University (KRU), the project's fictional test university.
Early iterations show that Kuali Student can successfully model a credit course and link it to various formats and activities using a single reusable canonical Learning Unit as the basic building block. This model should also extend to non-credit courses as well. It remains to be seen if Kuali Student can model other types such as degree programs, general education requirements, experiential learning, and projects the same way, but the applications are promising. Moreover, institutions will be able to customize the core building blocks to create new learning unit types.
Kuali Student Blog and Other Social Media
The Kuali Student Reporter is online at http://ksreporter.blogspot.com/. The blog is dedicated to providing visitors with information about the development of Kuali Student, while also providing an outlet for feedback. In addition to general updates, the Reporter will also provide news on available documentation on the project Web site, upcoming conference presentations, and opportunities to provide feedback.
Looking for more ways to follow the Kuali Student project? Kuali Student is also on Twitter (http://twitter.com/Kuali_Student) and Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=18276816288&ref=ts).
8. Update on Kuali Coeus
It is an exciting time on the Kuali Coeus project! Release 2.0 has entered its Quality Assurance (QA) phase, and our Subject Matter Experts are hard at work wrapping up specifications and testing functionality. Release 2.0 will include additional Proposal functionality, including Institutional Proposal and Proposal Hierarchy, and the Awards module. The release is slated for November 2009, and may make it in time for Kuali Days VIII. The other components of Release 2.X - IRB (Release 2.1) and Conflict of Interest (Release 2.2) are slated for 2010. You can view a copy of the most recent Kuali Coeus timeline at: http://www.kuali.org/communities/kc/timeline.html.
Kuali Coeus will have a full schedule of functional and technical sessions at Kuali Days VIII this November. We are preparing for our first ever pre-conference, which will include full demonstrations of Proposal and Award functionality. The Kuali Coeus track will offer sessions on implementation from both functional and technical perspectives, given by partner schools at varying stages of the planning/implementation process.
We continue to work with the Coeus Consortium (www.coeus.org) to make progress on the Kuali Coeus Roadmap. Joint working groups from Kuali and Coeus are working to define our sustainability model and propose pricing for sustaining membership. We are confident that the Kuali Coeus sustainability model will offer ample options for member institutions.
9. Wow - Look at that Community Support!
One of the myths surrounding community source software is that there is "no support" for adopters. There is a belief that, without having vendors with Service Level Agreements, institutions are completely on their own.
Members of the Kuali Community have often tried to dispel that myth by explaining the value of the Community and the kind of effective response a Community can provide. As schools begin to go live with Kuali software, the Kuali Community now has the opportunity to demonstrate exactly what they mean.
Colorado State University (CSU), which went live with Kuali Financial System 3.0 (KFS) in July 2009, recently turned to the Community for help with a production problem. The initial email was sent after business hours on a Thursday afternoon, and the first response was sent before business hours Friday morning. By the end of the day, seven people from six different institutions had participated in the thread. The problem and solution had been identified, and a Jira ticket had been opened to enhance KFS to make it easier to deal similar issues.
The following is a detailed account of what transpired:
August 13th
6:10PM
John Hunter from Colorado State writes an email to a KFS listserv detailing an issue that CSU encountered, which was preventing them from cutting checks to vendors.
August 14th
6:53AM
Jerry Neal from Indiana University writes with a basic explanation for the problem that CSU is experiencing, and asks about the use-case that caused the problem.
7:10AM
Cathy Salino from Cornell University chimes in from her mobile phone with a related use-case that Cornell experiences.
8:47AM
Jonathan Keller from UC Davis uses his mobile phone to offer a diagnosis and possible short-term solution.
9:49AM
Sterling George from Indiana University offers the solution that CSU eventually implements.
12:42PM
Pat Lynn from Michigan State University explains that MSU has a similar use-case scenario to CSU and Cornell.
2:19PM
Kymber Horn from The University of Arizona offers to create a Jira ticket to enhance KFS to make it easier to deal with batch check processing issues.
From here, Troy Fluharty and John Walker from CSU add more details about CSU's system, and by the beginning of the following week CSU was able to fix the problem in their production environment. John Hunter thanked everybody for such quick responses.
Just another day in the Kuali Community!
10. "Kuali Ready" Proposed for Early 2010
A new Kuali project is in the works and is expected to be available in early 2010. The name of the project is "Kuali Ready" and it is a business continuity planning tool for higher education. This tool will be somewhat different from other Kuali projects in that we plan on offering it in a Software as a Service (SaaS) environment. In this new service delivery model, institutions will be able to subscribe to the service through the Kuali Foundation and Kuali will source the service to parties who can deliver it in an effective manner. Initially, Kuali will source the service through the University of California Berkeley and Indiana University, who already have installed the software at their schools. Over time, it is expected that commercial entities may wish to offer this service as part of their business model.
Please look for more information about "Kuali Ready" at Kuali Days and through our web site soon! If you'd like to participate, please contact the Kuali Ready Project Manager at kualiready@berkeley.edu.
11. Kuali Uses rSmart Sakai CLE for Collaboration
Early this summer the http://collab.kuali.org site went live with rSmart's Sakai CLE, which provides collaborative tools that are vital to the Kuali community.
The Kuali community relies heavily on email lists for internal and public communications, and uses Sakai to manage this mission-critical service along with meeting agendas, minutes and other resources. Sakai CLE 2.6 offers important improvements to Kuali's previous email list engine, including the ability to send html-formatted emails and attachments.
Additionally, many Kuali teams use Sakai extensively for collaboration, taking advantage of Sakai's built-in tools to share and organize documents.
rSmart is playing a critical role in Kuali's Sakai implementation. "Since rSmart already has deep expertise in Sakai deployments, this contribution to the Kuali community is especially helpful. Kuali software has been built using Sakai for collaboration, and rSmart's work to upgrade us to Sakai's latest tools is timely for our work," said Brad Wheeler, Chair of the Kuali Foundation Board and Vice President for IT & Chief Information Officer at Indiana University.
12. Elections to the Kuali Foundation Board
At the end of this calendar year, six seats are opening on the Kuali Foundation Board. Three of those seats have been put up for election. The remainder will be appointed through the process designated in the Bylaws using our Nominating Committee. For more information on the Kuali Foundation Board and the elections of Board members, please see the Kuali Bylaws at: http://www.kuali.org/about/bylaws.html
The nomination solicitation process for elected seats was completed on September 1. When the nominations are accepted and validated, votes will be cast by Kuali voting members. Nominations for appointed seats by the project boards are currently in process.
We expect to have the entire process completed in late November and the new Board members will be seated officially on January 1, 2010.
13. Feature Article on Commercial Affiliate: IBM
IBM Global Business Services - A Long Standing Commitment to Open Source
IBM joined the Kuali Foundation as a Commercial Affiliate in 2006, and has been an active member of the community since, providing a range of services and contributions to the Kuali "movement" since the beginning. As a contributing sponsor and participant of the Kuali Days conferences, a consultant to schools evaluating Kuali solutions, an early technical advisor to the Kuali Student project, and an implementation partner to the major implementation at Michigan State University, IBM Global Business Services remains committed to the Open Source community in higher education.
In early 2007, IBM invested significant resources and created the IBM Kuali Center of Excellence (COE), reflecting our commitment to a long-term relationship with the Kuali community and to colleges and universities interested in a Kuali solution. IBM's Kuali COE allows IBM to provide our higher education clients access to IBM's best in class services and solutions, bringing lessons learned and advanced capabilities that have been developed in a competitive commercial environment to KFS implementations.
Running the current KFS system, the COE focuses on KFS training, testing, development, middleware integration, and interoperability. It also provides a demonstration and collaborative working environment for IBM and our partners. The Kuali COE focuses on five principal activities:
- Conduct KFS training for both functional and technical resources, for our clients and for IBM consultants
- Maintain a KFS testing and development sandbox
- Generate effective integration of KFS and the Kuali Rice middleware suite with proven IBM middleware and hardware infrastructure to lower implementation risk
- Provide a KFS demonstration environment for current and prospective clients
- Create a collaborative working environment for Kuali Foundation partners and other affiliates
In a very recent development, IBM awarded its prestigious Shared University Research Grant to the University of Hawaii and Illinois State University. The purpose of this grant is to investigate the process of porting Kuali Financials so it can run on the IBM System Z and with key IBM middleware products including DB2 and Websphere. We will also be working with our corporate affiliate rSmart on this project. The team will also research techniques for running Kuali Financials on the "IBM System Z Open Education Cloud", embracing Tivoli AIM cloud products and related IBM solutions.
IBM is committed to Kuali and continues to invest in supporting the Kuali community, assuring sustainability and working to ensure interoperability with a range of open standards based technology systems and solutions.
14. Kuali Welcomes New Operations Manager
Effective 10/05/09, Barb Black-Kurdziolek will be joining us as the Kuali Operations Manager. She will work closely with the Kuali Foundation Treasurer, the Treasurers of the project boards, and the Executive Director in managing the Kuali held funds. She will be responsible for bookkeeping, reporting, and tax compliance. She will also oversee storing and archiving of Kuali documents, provide support on special projects, and assist with team event planning. We look forward to having Barb as a part of our Kuali team. Barb resides at Indiana University and can be reached at barb@kuali.org.
15. Activities at EDUCAUSE 2009
EDUCAUSE 2009 will be held the first week of November in Denver, Colorado. Even with tight travel budgets, Kuali will be represented and we hope to see many of our colleagues there. For those who are members of the community or for those who want to learn more about Kuali and our community, please join us for the following activities.
RECEPTION: There will be a community source reception on Wednesday, 11/4 at 6:15pm in the Hyatt Capitol Ballroom 4, Level 4. Everyone is welcome! Please join us for food, drink, and good conversation about community source.
BOF: We plan on coordinating a "Birds of a Feather" session during the time slotted at the conference for that purpose, which is Wednesday 11/4 at 4:45pm. We will be posting information about this on the BOF bulletin board located near the conference registration desk, so please check that sometime on Wednesday for the details.
SESSIONS: Some sessions at the conference will be presented by Kuali members:
You Can't Change Learning with that Old Curriculum Management System: Designing the Next-Generation Curriculum Management System (Wednesday 11/4 at 3:50pm)
Designing Services within an SOA Student Information System (Wednesday 11/4 at 4:55pm)
Designing Data Warehousing and BI for Service-Oriented Solutions (Friday 11/6 at 8:10am)
Visit with Colorado State University
--What: Learn about Colorado State's Kuali Financials conversion
--When: Tuesday, November 3, 2009, 11:30am-2:00pm
--Where: Location to be determined (near EDUCAUSE convention center), Denver
--RSVP: Email megan.perrone@rsmart.com or call 602-490-0485
--Schedule:
11:30am - Noon - The current state and future plans for Kuali (Brad Wheeler)
Noon - 1:00pm - Project Team presentation
CSU's evaluation and selection process
Project team, planning and budget
Implementation experience and approach (including specific decisions to ease migration from the legacy FRS system)
Training approach and resources
Plans
1:00pm - 1:45pm - Lunch with the project team
1:45pm - 2:00pm - Next steps
"ASK ME" BUTTONS: Also, please look for people wearing "Ask Me About Kuali" Buttons - they are members of the community who are interested in networking with colleagues about the Kuali community and its projects.
16. Kuali Job Openings: Lead Technical Architect and Quality Assurance Director
The following two positions are being posted throughout the nation.
KUALI LEAD TECHNICAL ARCHITECT:
The Lead Technical Architect's role is to align technology vision with Kuali strategy by integrating applications with the appropriate technologies and defining a roadmap for technology changes that align with the objectives of all Kuali projects. This role will collaborate across all Kuali projects and with other open source communities, and keep current with leading edge technologies.
For further details see: http://www.kuali.org/news/2009/architect.html
KUALI QUALITY ASSURANCE DIRECTOR:
The QA Director is responsible for coordination and oversight of the quality assurance activities of the Kuali communities and projects. The QA Director oversees the setting of standards for processes, tools and methodologies used by the community. The QA Director will work directly with the project teams to ensure that all released software maintains the QA standards as well as traceability for documentation and release management. The QA Director sets an example for the community by demonstrating through his or her work and serves as the Kuali Foundation's main advocate for attention to Quality Assurance throughout the software development life cycle.
For further details see: http://www.kuali.org/news/2009/QualityAssurance.html
FOR BOTH OF THE ABOVE POSITIONS:
Depending on the circumstances of the successful applicant, the position could be established in a number of ways, including:
--an agreement to second 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. at jfoutty@kuali.org.
17. Upcoming Events
CACUBO Annual Meeting 2009
October 4-7, 2009
Cincinnati, OH
http://www.cacubo.org/announcements/Annual%20Meeting/index.html
EDUCAUSE 2009
November 3-6, 2009
Denver, CO
http://net.educause.edu/EDUCAUSEAnnualConference/1352
Kuali Days VIII
November 17-18, 2009
San Antonio, TX
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