Office of the University Registrar

A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education illustrates that the open-source approach to developing software to help manage universities is gaining legitimacy. Released earlier this week on its website, The Chronicle’s article “Business Software, Built by Colleges for Colleges, Challenges Commercial Giants” outlines how the Kuali Foundation’s grassroots efforts are beginning to challenge “Big Software.” (That term is a reference to traditional, fee-based software and consultation companies.)

The article focuses on Kuali Coeus, the grant-management component of the Kuali software suite, but also mentions Kuali Student (KS). The UW contributes to the development of KS and will consider using it in the future. That this open-source initiative is being discussed in The Chronicle as a legitimate contender to expensive, proprietary systems is an important part of Kuali’s evolution.

See other posts about Kuali on this blog.

Last month saw two major Kuali milestones. First, the Kuali software project celebrated its fifth birthday August 30. Second, the first official version of Kuali Rice (KR) was introduced; the “community-source” software graduated from beta status with its 1.0 release.

According to its website (revamped for this new release), KR “provides an enterprise-class middleware suite of integrated products that allows for applications to be built in an agile fashion.” To describe it with a cooking metaphor, it’s the egg in cookie dough that helps bind everything together. KR includes modules for managing user identities and for transmitting messages among other components of the Kuali software suite, such as the financial package KFS and Kuali Student.

The UW is playing a significant role in the development of Kuali Student and Kuali Rice systems, with a member of the Office of the University Registrar serving on the team developing Kuali Student. We’ve detailed Kuali’s progress on this blog in order to keep the UW community abreast of a set of software tools that may power our own information systems some day.

July 1 marked the beginning of a new fiscal year. It makes sense, then, that Colorado State University and San Joaquin Delta College chose that day to launch the Kuali Financial System (KFS) on their campuses.

The adoption of the Kuali’s financial system by other universities is a major milestone for Kuali, a consortium of community-source enterprise system projects working to bring next-generation capability to all aspects of higher-education management. The University of Washington is currently conducting the Financial Systems Needs Assessment (FSNA) project, and KFS is among the list of solutions that will be assessed as that project moves into soluition evaluation in the coming year.

The UW is playing a significant role in the development of Kuali Student and Kuali Rice systems, so the Office of the University Registrar pays special attention to achievements like this one. We’ve detailed Kuali’s progress on this blog in order to keep the UW community abreast of a set of software tools that may power our own information systems some day.

Extras: Read an open letter to the Kuali community from Patrick J. Burns and Allison Dineen, Vice Presidents for IT and Finance at Colorado State University, or a similar open letter from Dr. Jon C. Stephens, Vice President of Business Services at San Joaquin Delta College. You can get more background on the topic of open- and community-source software in higher education in this article on Kuali at Inside Higher Ed.

A few items worth noting about Kuali Student, the community-sourced student data management system that the UW is a founding member of.

• Another founding-member school – The Naval Postgraduate School, along with San Joaquin Delta College, have joined the Kuali Student project. They will share the responsibilities and authority as a founding member.
• UW staffer profiled – Alexis Raphael, a Senior Communications Specialist for the Office of Information Management, was profiled as a featured Kuali Student contributor.
• UW to host Kuali conference – July 13-17 the UW campus will host the Kuali Student “R1 Setup” conference.

More information on these items and others can be found on this post at the Kuali Student blog.

Kuali, a project whose scope is so big a full definition should be left to their website, is already an important topic on campus and will only become more so in the coming years. Keeping informed of Kuali developments could be a full-time job. The Kuali Foundation understood this and created the position of Member Liaison to help the higher education community stay on top of Kuali-related news.

Zachary Naiman stepped into the position this week and launched a blog to facilitate communication among the open-source software-development group and its members (including the UW and other higher-education institutions). In Naiman’s words:

When people hear “Kuali,” I want them to think about a supportive community where it is easy to find the information you need, get your questions answered, and encounter reliable partners to assist you in evaluating, implementing and maintaining Kuali software. I want Kuali to be the pudding that proves that open-source software does not come at the expense of support, that a community can provide far better assistance than a 1-800 number.

Read the rest of his first post (and many others to follow) to learn—and contribute to the conversation—about the software products that the UW is helping to shape and will use for years to come. Of course, the OUR will blog about Kuali news relevant to the UW community.

No, we’re not talking about an Australian bear. Kuali Student is an open-source software platform for managing student information, including grades, transcripts, tuition and more. The UW is a proud founding partner of Kuali Student and because of its impact on student information, the Office of the University Registrar is playing a significant role. Todd Mildon and Sara Gomez are on the Kuali Student Board. It’s a big project involving not just the UW, but other institutions of higher learning like UC Berkley and Florida State.

The provost and the UW’s Office of Information Management has put together an extensive website explaining the UW’s involvement in this important project. Expect to see more about Kuali over the coming year.