Unicon’s New Academus Open Campus Offers Easy Startup Options for Sakai’s Collaboration and Learning Environment

Site Offers Access to Test Drives, Pilot Projects, Custom Hosted Solutions & Full-Scale Implementations

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20060531005901&newsLang=en

PHOENIX–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 31, 2006–Unicon Inc., the leading independent provider of enterprise portal, collaboration, learning, and integration technology for higher education institutions, today announced its new Academus Open Campus (AOC) Portal featuring the latest in Sakai’s Collaboration and Learning Environment technologies. The new site is designed to provide academic administrators, faculty, and IT personnel with a variety of low-cost and low-risk options for quickly evaluating and deploying the latest open source technologies from Sakai and other vendors. The new site is located at www.academusopencampus.com.

“Higher Ed has the daunting challenge of choosing the right technologies to increase the capacity of their online services while maintaining finite resources,” stated John C. Blakely, CEO of Unicon Inc. “Our Academus Open Campus makes those choices easier by providing a variety of scalable options for testing and implementing the latest open-community online learning management solutions.”

Technorati Tags: Sakai

rSmart Launches rSmart Sakai CLE; rSmart Follows Trail Blazed by Red Hat

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20060531005274&newsLang=en

Sakai Conference
VANCOUVER, British Columbia–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 31, 2006–rSmart, the prime source of commercial open source applications for education, announced the availability of the first and only commercial distribution of Sakai, rSmart Sakai CLE, today at the 5th Sakai Conference taking place in Vancouver, British Columbia. The rSmart Sakai CLE enables educational institutions to realize the benefits of open source innovation by offering the comprehensive support and services required when implementing enterprise software on campus.

In much the same way that Red Hat offers its Red Hat Enterprise Linux solution while contributing to the Linux community, rSmart offers its rSmart Sakai CLE as a fully supported version of Sakai.

Technorati Tags: Sakai

Elluminate and Unicon Provide Low-Cost Trial Option for Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment

http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=131891

Elluminate, Inc., a leading provider of live eLearning and Web collaboration solutions for the real-time organization, and Unicon, the leading independent provider of open-source enterprise portal, collaboration, learning and integration technology for higher education institutions, today announced a partnership. The two companies will collaborate to deliver a joint product and service offering for the Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE) for academic institutions at the K-12, community college and higher education levels.

The Sakai Project is a community-source effort to develop a platform for teaching, learning, collaboration and research that began in 2004 as a collaborative effort between Berkley, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford and the University of Michigan. An alternative to proprietary or homegrown course management solutions, Sakai combines an application framework with a wide variety of associated CMS tools and components that are designed to work together.

Technorati Tags: Sakai

NSF Releases NMI-R9

http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/649667.html

Providing new event diagnostic, privilege management and portal-building tools, the ninth release of the National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative (NMI-R9) makes further progress in addressing the challenge of collaborating online in a shared cyberinfrastructure environment. NMI-R9 is available to the public for downloading under open-source licenses at www.nsf-middleware.org.

…
In a single download and one-step build process, the OGCE Version 2.0 provides a complete toolkit for building science-portal gateways. Newly incorporated Sakai collaboration portlets provide access to their tools such as calendar scheduling, document sharing and chat functions.
…

Unicon Participates in Four Sakai Technology Seminars at Community Source Week

Sessions Cover a Variety of Topics Ranging from Faculty Support to Advanced Tool Development
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20060524005921&newsLang=en

PHOENIX–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 24, 2006–Unicon Inc., the leading independent provider of enterprise portal, collaboration, learning and integration technology for higher education institutions, will be presenting and participating in four technical sessions based on the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment at the Community Source Week Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, from May 30, 2006 through June 2, 2006. The sessions are open to all attendees of the conference.

Technorati Tags: Sakai