Here, thanks to the magic of SlideShare, are the slides from one of the Academic Enterprise Initiative (AEI) presentations at the Atlanta conference:
A few comments on the presentation are in order:
First, there’s a difference between AEI and “Sakai for Oracle.” The former is a broad plan for a unified “academic enterprise”, in part through standards-based interoperability between Oracle products and Sakai, while the latter is a version of Sakai configured to interoperate with other AEI components.
Here’s a picture from the presentation of how the two are related:
The blue boxes are just plain old Sakai. Which brings me to my next point. “Sakai for Oracle” is Sakai. The core stack is essentially the same as you would download from the Sakai web site. At most, there will be connectors that allow Oracle tools to interoperate with Sakai, and the goal of the AEI team is to minimize that sort of thing and use naked, standard interfaces wherever that is possible. (More on this in a future post.) Any significant changes that Oracle wants to make to core Sakai for the purposes of AEI will be made by Unicon in cooperation with the Sakai community and will be submitted back to the community. “Sakai for Oracle” is not intended to be a fork; it is intended to be a supported configuration.
Unicon will be doing all the development on the Sakai side of AEI, while Oracle will do the development on the Oracle products side (naturally). Both companies will work together to provide end-to-end support. In my opinion, Unicon’s participation in the project adds significant credibility to Oracle’s commitment to Open Source and to working with the higher education community. Here’s a slide presentation that Jim Layne, Unicon’s VP of Marketing, made at the same conference regarding their business model:
This is an impressively well thought out plan to create a win-win-win relationship between Open Source projects, universities that want to use the software but don’t necessarily have the human resources to support it (much less participate in its development), and a support vendor. “Sakai for Oracle” can only benefit from the ecosystem that Unicon is fostering.
Michael Feldstein is the founder of e-Literate who currently works as the Senior Program Manager for MindTap at Cengage Learning. For more information, see his profile page.
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