INTRODUCTION 

We have decided on a new format for this edition of the quarterly newsletter so it is easier to peruse the information.  Articles have been separated into two sections: the breaking news section includes fresh information that hasn’t been posted to the Kuali News or Kuali Insider feeds, and the quarterly update section includes highlights of news since the last edition of the newsletter.  We also are making more use of links for further detail to keep the newsletter itself as concise as possible. We hope you like these changes.   

BREAKING NEWS 

Welcome New Kuali Members and Kuali Commercial Affiliate 

Recently we welcomed five new members to the Kuali community.  Four higher education institutions have joined as members – they are The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, West Virginia University, Brown University, and the University of Toronto.  Moderas has joined as a new Kuali Commercial Affiliate.  West Virginia University is also a new investing partner in Kuali Coeus, and the University of Toronto is also a founding partner in Kuali Ready.  We welcome all of these new members to Kuali!

Update on Kuali Coeus 

The Kuali Coeus project team continues to make good progress on the QA efforts for delivery of the KC Release 2.0 in April.  This release will include the Awards and the Proposal Hierarchy functionality, and will complete the core modules for grant administration.  The KC leadership team has also been working very closely with Coeus community leadership to begin mapping out plans for getting Kuali Coeus to functional equivalency with the Coeus 4.5 release, which is due out in early 2011.  As a result of this effort, a more specific plan for future KC releases beyond April and the upcoming convergence of Coeus and KC will be made available within the next few weeks. Included in that plan will be the scheduled delivery dates for the compliance modules. 

Adoption Highlights:  UC Davis delivers Rice-based academic promotion and merit system 

In January 2010 UC Davis launched a new version of MyInfoVault, their locally developed academic merit and promotion system, which is now integrated with their central Kuali Rice service.  This application provides UC Davis faculty and academic personnel an easy way to document and update faculty career accomplishments in a data repository that is selectively mined to create an electronic dossier used in the evaluation process for academic merits and promotions. Faculty dossier information includes publications and creative work, grant proposals and awards, certifications, teaching evaluations, and other supporting documentation. Remote access to the web-based dossier allows administrators and faculty reviewers to participate in the peer review process at any time from any location.  By leveraging UC Davis’s central Kuali Rice service, MyInfoVault is able to manage users and dossier workflow using predefined roles, routing, and approval processes defined within the central Rice service.  This MyInfoVault release marks a significant milestone for UC Davis towards a central Rice service offering and integration of Rice applications.  More information about MyInfoVault can be found at: https://confluence.ucdavis.edu/confluence/x/bEo.  

Commercial Affiliate Profile:  Huron Consulting 

Huron Consulting Group became a Kuali Commercial Affiliate in 2007.  Our commitment has been concentrated in two areas: developing a great solution and helping institutions consider adopting that solution.  We have been assisting with testing of Kuali Coeus since release 1.1, and Huron currently has 6 professionals engaged in testing release 2.0.  We also assisted with design review and consultation around adaptation of the Coeus Conflict of Interest module to KC. 

As we all know, the addition of new institutions to the KC community is important to the long-run success of KC. Recognizing that there is no sales force available to respond to RFPs, Huron developed a standard RFP requirements matrix for research administration software and assisted the KC team with providing responses based on current and anticipated functionality.  This resource, which will be maintained and updated as KC is developed and released, is available on the Kuali Coeus web site.  Huron has also worked with institutions considering Kuali to understand how KC might meet their needs.  

Huron remains committed to the Kuali Community.  Huron provides a representative to the extended KC board and actively participates in Kuali Days.  As testing of KC release 2.0 winds down Huron will begin developing a demo of KC 2.0 using the Test Drive facility, and Huron will begin to develop an implementation methodology for Kuali Coeus.  

Beyond our interest in Kuali, Huron Consulting Group provides a wide range of consulting services to academic institutions and is a recognized leader in the implementation of applications that support research administration.  Huron has assisted many institutions with the selection and implementation of software (including Lawson Grant Management, Peoplesoft Grants, InfoEd, and Click Commerce) in this critical area.  We continue to be committed to bringing this expertise to the Kuali Community.

For more information about Huron’s involvement in the Kuali Community, please contact Matthew Staman: mstaman@huronconsultinggroup.com   

QUARTERLY UPDATE 

Releases Delivered for KFS and Rice 

The Kuali Financial System (KFS) version 3.0.1 and Kuali Rice version 1.0.1.1 were recently released.  See more at http://www.kuali.org/node/274. 

Welcome New Projects 

We have two new projects in the Kuali community: Kuali Open Library Environment (Kuali OLE) and Kuali Ready. Kuali OLE was chartered in December and received a $2.38 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Kuali Ready is underway to deliver a business continuity planning system as both an open source download and as a Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery.  It is the first project with an above campus service approach so we look forward to that new way of serving the higher education community. For further information, see http://kuali.org/node/268 for OLE and http://kuali.org/ready for Ready.

Kuali IT Support project in incubation

Recently, we announced that Indiana University and the University of Hawaii are inviting partners to join them to develop Kuali IT Support, a new incubation project envisioned to offer a set of components that will provide more effective solutions for IT support in higher education while significantly lowering costs.  For more information, see:  http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/13670.html.  

Changes at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was instrumental in the formation of the Kuali Foundation by providing seed money to four projects.  The Kuali Foundation Board has commented on the recent changes at the Mellon Foundation with the merger of the RIT program into the Scholarly Communications program at http://kuali.org/node/265. 

Adoption Highlights: USC Implements KFS modules 

The University of Southern California recently implemented some modules of Kuali Financial System (KFS) 3.0 and also developed some tools in partnership with VivanTech, a Kuali Commercial Affiliate, that have been contributed back to the community.  For further information see  http://kuali.org/usc-story. 

Kuali Featured in NACUBO Business Officer 

The Kuali Financial System was highlighted in a recent NACUBO Business Officer article by Anna-Louise Jackson.  The full article can be found at:  http://www.nacubo.org/Business_Officer_Magazine/Current_Issue/February_2010/Going_for_the_Bold.html  

Florida State University Leaves Kuali Community 

Florida State University recently announced that they would be leaving the Kuali Community due to fiscal constraints in their state.  More information can be found at http://kuali.org/node/284.  

KIS 

In early March, Kuali released an alpha-version of the Kuali Information System (KIS) to the community. KIS serves a number of functions for Kuali. It is a directory of Kuali people, projects, teams, member organizations and eventually it will include implementation projects as well.  It is a self-service interface for community members to update their contact information, and includes a team/organization management interface for team leads.  It is a resource discovery tool for finding community collaboration and contribution projects.  It has a dashboard to easily view and request access to Kuali resources. Finally, it has an identity management engine that maps your various accounts on Kuali's systems to your KIS account, allowing us to move toward a single sign-on and take advantage of our InCommon membership.

As the community starts using KIS more and the application and underlying data mature, we will progress KIS from alpha to beta before considering the infrastructure to be fully in-production.  Please feel free to use KIS, and send your feedback to help@kuali.org  

Kuali Welcomes New QA Director and Lead Technical Architect 

In January 2010 Jessica Coltrin joined the Kuali team as the Kuali Quality Assurance Director.  Jessica is working closely with the Kuali Member Liaison, Kuali Configuration Manager, and the QA Leads on all the projects to develop an overall infrastructure and methodology for managing quality of the Kuali brand through all phases of design, development, and delivery. Jessica comes to us from The University of Arizona and has experience with enterprise software development and quality assurance oversight.  We look forward to having Jessica as a part of our Kuali team. Jessica will continue to reside in Tucson and can be reached at jessica@kuali.org.

We are also pleased to announce that Tom Bradford has been selected as the new Lead Technical Architect for the Kuali Rice project.  Tom started in this role on March 15.  The Kuali Rice project has been steadily growing over the past few years. As we continue to plan for the future and move the vision for the Rice project forward, the need for a dedicated Lead Architect has been of increasing importance.  In conjunction with the roadmap committees, Tom will help to define and implement a roadmap for technology and architecture improvements that align with the objectives of all Kuali projects and Rice investing partners.  Tom brings with him an extensive background in software architecture and engineering which makes him a great fit for this position and a true asset to the community.  He has been involved in a number of Kuali Rice and Kuali Financial System projects as a member of the rSmart team. During this time, he also contributed to the Kuali Rice project as a part-time team member.  We welcome Tom in this new role!

Kuali Days and Kuali Spring Workshop 

Kuali Days VIII in San Antonio was a great success and was the last Kuali Days in the style of an enhanced community event, which began back in 2005.  During the 2010 calendar year we will be moving to a new model for our Kuali meetings and conferences.  Each Spring we will hold a Community Workshop consisting of internal team meetings by Kuali projects; this is an opportunity for all Kuali teams to come together in a Face-to-Face gathering.  These Spring meetings will be for Kuali members and partners only. Each Fall we will hold a Kuali Days Conference, but in 2010 it will become a User Conference with a call for proposals and additional activities that would be expected in a robust User Conference experience.  The Kuali Days conference each fall will be open to all.  The Kuali Days IX Conference will be held in San Diego.  Look for more information on the Kuali web site soon.  

Upcoming Events 

Coeus 2010 User Conference
March 21-23, 2010
San Antonio, TX
http://www.coeus.org/

WACUBO 2010 Annual Meeting
May 2-5, 2010
Anaheim, CA
http://www.wacubo.org/meet/meet.shtml

Kuali Spring Workshop
May 17-21, 2010
Fort Collins, CO
https://test.kuali.org/confluence/display/KULFOUND/Kuali+Spring+Workshop...  

Advance CAMP: The Second Identity Services Summit
June 23-25, 2010
Raleigh, North Carolina
https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/ACAMPIdSummit2010/Home  

NACUBO 2010 Annual Meeting
July 24-27, 2010
San Francisco, CA
http://www.nacuboannualmeeting.org/  

CACUBO Annual Meeting 2010
October 3-5, 2010
Indianapolis, IN
http://www.cacubo.org/announcements/Annual%20Meeting/index.html  

EDUCAUSE 2010
October 12-15, 2010
Anaheim, CA
http://net.educause.edu/e10