In the next chapter, you will discover how easy it is to install and use the demonstration version of Sakai on any modern desktop computer, be it Windows, Mac, or Linux. However, why would you deploy Sakai in the larger organizational context in the first place?
No man is an island and no learning system lives outside the context of the organization it supports. Here are some key points for why an organization can be comfortable choosing Sakai:
Educators and software engineers have designed the application from the bottom up and top down to be an effective and flexible learning environment.
An active community is adding useful tools to the mix all the time.
The Sakai Foundation stimulates the growth and good order of the community and is the contact point for project coordination and life-cycle management.
There is a strong central quality-assurance process with many early adopters of new releases. This makes it much less likely that you will have to wake up a system administrator in the middle of the night to deal for the fourth time with an unexpected crash.
There is a commercial partnership program, which means you can buy in support or outsource when you need to.
With standard hardware such as load balancers and Oracle or MySQL databases, Sakai has been deployed for individual organizations past the 170,000-user mark and is relatively simple to set up for even the smallest of pilot programs.
Sakai is a Java-based application using technologies such as Tomcat (http://tomcat.apache.org) as its application server and Spring (http://springframework.org/about) for managing the way it interacts with databases and injects services into tools and other well-known and widely understood frameworks. Java plays well when developed in distributed teams, and the use of mainstream technologies makes it easier to find developers or support in the marketplace.
Sakai supports web services for loosely couple Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). SOAs are the structure of choice for many organizations' internal administration.
To create, modify, or delete users, courses, and groups externally, this learning environment has integration points called providers that allow relatively easy incorporation into your own administration systems.
Sakai is not going away at any time soon. It has easily passed the critical user-base mass for long-term growth.
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Leon Raijmann, an educationalist and top-level manager at the University of Amsterdam, further discusses management buy-in factors in Chapter 16, A Crib Sheet for Selling Sakai to Traditional Management.
Note
Long URLs and Confluence
An approximate description of Confluence is that it is an enhanced wiki. The Sakai community uses one (http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence) as a place to quickly build up documentation and expand ideas. However, the URLs of content are not always particularly readable, and some of the links may be difficult to copy into your web browser. If you get stuck or content has moved, search adding key terms in the search bar found at the top of any Confluence web page.