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Implementing Sakai at Your Institution. Small-scale Sakai at Boston University. School of Management. 4000 users, roughly 100 concurrent users Small staff A different set of skills Heavy user of Blackboard Broad but shallow adoption Joined Sakai Feb. 2004. Non-technical challenges.
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School of Management • 4000 users, roughly 100 concurrent users • Small staff • A different set of skills • Heavy user of Blackboard • Broad but shallow adoption • Joined Sakai Feb. 2004
Non-technical challenges • Re-orienting a department • Strategic shift from maintenance to open source development • Little Java skill and open source experience • Buy-in from administration • Buy-in from faculty • Pilot marketing
Pilot • 5 faculty in Fall, 10 faculty in Spring • Focus groups, experimental tool surfacing • Unexpected outcomes • Research sites • Sparking reflection among faculty • Establishing the infrastructure and practices • Local Subversion repo • Identifying feature gaps, developing training materials • Staging machines and deployment schedule
Migration • (the year ahead) Running Blackboard and Sakai in parallel Moving to 2.2, depending on our own development
Staff • 2 developers part-time (Sakai activity varies – say 1 FTE) • 1 sys admin part-time (say 0.3 FTE) • 1 DBA very part-time (say 0.05 FTE) • User support (doubling as QA – say 1 FTE) • Me • Sakai librarian • Sakai consultant • Sakai deployment R&D • Project management
Lessons (un)learned • Don't run the latest release in production • Sakai development is hard • And documentation is too good to be true • Sakai is us • But collaboration costs, and we have to continue gauging efficiencies. • You can't ignore the social component.
implementation history • spring 2005: v1.0 * small pilot * single server • summer 2005: v1.5 * production * manual site creation • fall 2005: v2.0.1 * integration with Banner, clustered environment • spring 2006: v2.0.1 * integration with student course selection worksheet • summer 2006: v2.1.2
*v2: an ITS-wide initiative • Center for Media Initiatives: overall project ownership, support and management (2 FTE) • Application Development Group: customization, integration (2 FTE) • Technology & Planning: system administration and implementation (0.5 FTE) • Database Administration Group: Oracle database administration (2 FTE) • Data Center Services: server/SAN maintenance (0.25 FTE)
classes*v2 adoption • Fall 2005: 250 courses * 174 instructors • Spring 2006: 500 courses * 350 instructors • Project sites: over 100
future plans • Legacy system phased out by fall 2007 • Expansion to include professional schools • Distributed support system
Implementation Overview • 5000 concurrent users, 90,000+ on system • 3 years of running Sakai • Running 2.1.2 • Migrated from home grown system • Significant investment 17
Support Overview • Customer Service/Technical Support • Training (Academic and Administrative) • Documentation • Quality Control (testing) • Technical Staff (for local integration and customization)
Operations Overview • Data center, networking, storage, etc. • Environments in use: • Test, Production, Load, Pilot • Direct costs (hardware, software) • Managing change once the software is up
Management Overview • CTAC (Administrative Committee) • CFAC (Faculty Advisory Committee) • Campus Communications (CTools SIG, ATCommons, etc.) • Migration experience
Key Learnings • Maintaining a stable, yet cutting edge environment is very difficult • Systems are 24 x 7 x 365; high customer expectations
Implementation History • Spring 2005 - small pilot - v1.0 - single server • Summer 2005 - production - v1.5 - manual site creation • Fall 2005 - v2.0.1 - integration with Banner, clustered environment • Spring 2006 - v2.0.1 - integration with student course selection worksheet • Summer 2006 - v2.1.2
classes*v2 is an ITS-wide initiative • CMI - overall project ownership, support and management (2 FTE) • Technology & Planning - system administration and implementation (0.5 FTE) • DBA group - Oracle database administration (0.25 FTE) • Application Development Group (2 FTE) • Data Center Services - server/SAN maintenance (0.25 FTE)