Thanks for revisiting this post. At the time I wrote it (late 2004), Sakai was significantly more opaque to me than it is now. (I read somewhere not too long ago about Albany Medical College implementing Sakai on a shoestring budget; I’ll post the details if I can find them.) At the same time, I appreciate your setting the record straight.

While we’re on the topic, I would imagine that more data regarding Sakai implementation costs will become available in the next two years. It appears that there’s been a significant uptick of pilot installations for the 2005-2006 year, possibly because many institutions were waiting for 2.0. If this is correct, then we should see more full-blown installations in 2006-2007. Hopefully people will publish information about their experiences, including costs.

The grants that I was awarded by the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, on behalf of Foothill College, were/are “development” grants to build tools and enhancements upon Sakai (primarily to close gaps between Sakai and our legacy system ETUDES) that address our CA CC e-learning needs. The Melete lesson builder closed one of the gaps for our user community, for example. No funding was given for Sakai implementation costs. The consortium, ETUDES Alliance, that I manage, covers its own operational, hosting, and support costs.

We have made great progress with our migration plan to ETUDES-NG, our Sakai brand. All member colleges will be migrated over by June 2007.