QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER September 2010

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INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the September Quarterly newsletter. It’s been a busy summer for the Kuali Foundation and Kuali projects.

The most exciting activity is our upcoming Kuali Days 2010 Conference in San Diego, California on November 8-10, 2010. This year, we updated our conference program to have more outreach beyond the community, so the activities, events, and networking will provide a broader perspective! We are truly moving “From Theory to Practice” in Kuali! See the article below in this newsletter for all the details. The web site for information, including registration and travel information, is: http://kuali.org/kd/kd2010. We want to see all of you there!

NEW MEMBERS AND INVESTING PARTNERS

New Members

Since our last published newsletter, we have added five new members to the Kuali community: Tulane University, Brock University, and the University of Connecticut are new institutional members. HTC Global and Navigator Management Partners have become new Kuali Commercial Affiliates.

We welcome our new members!

New Investing Partners in Kuali Projects

In addition to becoming a member of the Kuali Community, the University of Connecticut has also become a sustaining partner in the Kuali Financial System project. This is very exciting, because UConn has been communicating with the KFS team for some time, so having them join KFS as a partner is most welcome. We’re glad to have UConn on board!

KUALI PROJECT UPDATES

Kuali Coeus

What’s the latest on the Kuali Coeus project? The Quality Assurance process is in full swing for the Kuali Coeus (KC) 3.0 release. KC 3.0 includes a robust set of Institutional Review Board (IRB) functionality that many schools are excited to begin using. In addition to delivering the IRB module, KC 3.0 also includes numerous fixes and enhancements to the KC 2.0 functionality released in May. The KC 3.0 release is on schedule and will be delivered next month!

The KC Project is happy to announce that Jennifer Flach has agreed to join the project on a part-time basis as QA Manager. Jen is legendary for her amazing work on the Coeus research administration software and brings a tremendous amount of expertise to the KC team. Jen has already begun working with the very competent team of KC QA Leads, Subject-Matter Experts (SMEs), and numerous testers to organize the QA effort. The QA process is an immense team effort involving individuals from across all of the KC partner institutions to ensure a successful KC 3.0 release.

Speaking of success, the measuring stick for all Kuali projects is the number of successful implementations. With the release of KC 2.0, several KC partners have started their KC implementation projects. Many good discussions have already taken place on the KC implementers collaboration lists in support of these efforts. We will keep you posted on the success of these implementations. If you’re interested in joining one of the KC collaboration lists, you can find more at http://www.kuali.org/kis/collabs (FYI, you will need to create a Kuali Information System account to join and begin participating).

The Coeus and Kuali communities continue to work together towards meeting our goals of delivering high quality research administration software to higher education. The KC governance process now reflects this convergence. The recent formation of the Kuali Coeus Community (KCC) is additional evidence of our progress. The KCC is the sustainability organization whose mission is to create, maintain and support a robust electronic solution to manage all components of research administration and research compliance from proposal development through award closeout while fostering best practices by joining innovative technology with the knowledge base of a national consortium of research stakeholders. The KCC already has its first new member with many more to follow in the future.

After the release of KC 3.0 in October, the KC project team focus will be on KC 3.1. The KC 3.1 release brings KC closer to providing functional equivalence with Coeus 4.5 for the Award, Budget, and Proposal Development modules. KC 3.1 will be released in Q1 2011. The next major release of KC, KC 4.0, targeted for Q3 2011 will include the Conflict of Interest, Subawards, Negotiations, and Report Tracking modules. Full equivalency with Coeus 4.5 is expected to be delivered by the end of calendar year 2011 in the Kuali Coeus 5.0 release.

There is still much work to be done. The KC team continues to make very good progress. This is an exciting time for KC as our software continues to improve while becoming closer to equivalence with Coeus functionality. It is also exciting to see the Coeus community converging with the Kuali community to build the next generation of research administration software. The results of this hard work will be evident in the numerous implementations that will be a reality within the next year. It is great to see the KC community achieving results through effective collaboration.

Kuali Financial System

Kuali Financial System (KFS) development continues for release of KFS 4.0 in the Fall of 2010. Several module fixes have been contributed by implementing partner institutions and the KFS Project sustainability team. Kuali Endowment Management (KEM), a new module entirely devoted to tracking endowments, continues to be the main focus of this release. Other development areas in progress for KFS 4.0 are KEM user documentation, integration between KFS and Kuali Coeus (KC) and building a suite of automated test scripts, which will most likely mature over a couple of releases.

As the KFS Project has moved into “sustainability” there are a series of other areas being coordinated such as a KFS Roadmap, which maps expected functional and technical deliverables over a period of time, patch cycle management and contributed code management. Specifics on these will be communicated in a future newsletter.

Kuali Student

The Kuali Student Program (KS) will issue its first public software release of the Curriculum Management modules (release 1.1) in late November 2010. This release will comprises all of the business functionality and SOA software infrastructure to make possible the online creation, modification, approval, and retirement of courses. All KS business functionality is enabled by the Kuali Rice infrastructure services including identity services (KIM), the enterprise workflow engine (KEW) and new Business Rules Management services. These infrastructure services will combine to make this and future Kuali Student modules highly configurable to match local business requirements.

Kuali Rice

Kuali Rice released patch version 1.0.2.1 on July 23rd consisting of bug fixes for 1.0.2. The team continues to move forward on version 1.0.3 which is planned to be the common Rice release for the upcoming KFS 4.0, KC 3.0, and KS 1.1 releases. Rice 1.1 is in the Analysis and Design phase. Key improvements in the 1.1 release include middleware version compatibility, business rules user interface, enhancements to the rapid application development framework (KRAD), and improved modularity. Business rules analysis continues in conjunction with the Kuali Coeus team and existing open source rule technologies are being assessed for viability.

The Kuali Rice team is engaging industry specialists to address immediate, strategically important, critical-path work including version compatibility, aligning Kuali Student and Rice application development frameworks to help KS achieve its ambitious development goals, and supporting Kuali Coeus functional equivalence. In accordance with the "not invented here" principle in the Rice Charter, these experts are often committers on other open source projects intended to assist the team in quickly coming up to speed on existing open source software and practices for use in Rice. Currently, Rice has contracted with Savoir Technologies on version compatibility and they are working with the Lead Technical Architect and the Kuali Technical Integration (KTI) group to plan and implement version compatibility in the context of the needs of the Kuali Community.

Rice is growing! The project is currently recruiting a Project Manager, Business Analyst, Configuration Manager, and Developers. Details on the positions are available at http://kuali.org/node/402.

Eric Westfall will be handing over the reins as Project Manager so that he can assume responsibilities as the project’s full time Lead Technical Architect. Jessica Coltrin, the Kuali Foundation QA Director, is filling in as interim Project Manager until a new Project Manager is hired and up to speed. Additionally, Jessica will be Rice QA Manager through the 1.1 release.

Kuali OLE

Work on Kuali OLE has commenced. Significant work has already been completed by the Functional Council, the Communication Team, the Data Model Team, the User Stories Team, and the Workflow team. The Technical Team begins its meetings in September. Several job descriptions have been posted, and the core team will begin their work in the near future. For more information about Kuali OLE, please visit our site at http://kuali.org/ole.

Kuali Ready

Kuali Ready, the Kuali Foundation's first hosted service, continues to generate a great deal of interest in the higher education community. As of late August, there are over 40 subscribers and we are receiving product inquiries on an ongoing basis. Currently, the software-as-a-service product is available to founders and early adopters. A General Availability release of Kuali Ready will be available during the fourth quarter of 2010. For more information about our continuity planning tool for higher education, please visit our site at http://kuali.org/ready.

QUARTERLY UPDATE

Kuali Endowment Management Module Announced

The Kuali Financial System project is announcing the delivery of Kuali Endowment Management, a module that is slated for release in November of this year. Because of the importance of this module to many partner institutions and also potential adopters, information about this new functionality is being widely publicized. The Treasury Institute has published a white paper on Kuali Endowment Management -- you can download the white paper at http://www.treasuryinstitute.org/KEM%20Whitepaper.pdf, and learn more about Kuali Endowment Management at Kuali Days in November.

Activities at EDUCAUSE 2010

There are many activities, sessions, and events of interest to the Kuali community at EDUCAUSE 2010 this year. EDUCAUSE 2010 will be held in Anaheim October 12-15, 2010. Please see http://kuali.org/educause2010, for a listing of those activities and events.

Register Now for Kuali Days 2010

The Kuali Days 2010 Conference Committee received more than 110 responses to the Call for Proposals, and is putting together a very exciting conference program. We hope you will join us in San Diego on November 8-10!

Be sure to check the Kuali Days Website for more information about the conference program including pre-conference workshops, general session speakers and Kuali project meetings. The full conference program is scheduled to be online in the next few weeks.

Conference Sponsorships Available: The Kuali Days Conference Committee invites companies who want to engage with a growing community of universities, colleges, businesses, and other organizations that have partnered to build and sustain open source software for higher education by higher education to participate in the conference through sponsorship opportunities.

Kuali Days 2010 Registration: Don’t miss out on this conference! Register early and save!

Kuali Days 2010 Hotel Reservations: The beautiful Manchester Grand Hyatt located on the San Diego Bay and next to Sea Port Village awaits your reservation. The cut-off date for making sure you get the conference special rate of $169 is October 15, 2010.

New Job Postings in the Kuali Community

Our community is growing! Since the last quarterly newsletter, we have job postings for many of the projects as well as some implementing schools. The Rice project is recruiting for the following positions: Project Manager, Business Analyst, Configuration Manager, and Developers. See http://kuali.org/node/402 for more information.

The OLE Project is recruiting for the following positions: Senior Architect and Data Architect. See http://kuali.org/node/410 for more information.

See the Kuali Insider feed for more information on all job opportunities. If you are looking to hire people for your Kuali implementation, please send your job announcement to help@kuali.org and ask the Kuali Foundation to post it to the Kuali website.

UPCOMING EVENTS

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://www.educause.edu/E2010

NCURA Annual Meeting
October 31 - November 3, 2010
Washington, DC
http://www.ncura.edu/content/educational_programs/sites/52/

Kuali Days 2010
November 8-10, 2010
Manchester Grand Hyatt, San Diego, CA
http://kuali.org/kd