If you have more than a few students, teachers, and project workers, you could save many person-hours and lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) by integrating Sakai with the data from other enterprise systems. Luckily, the application is flexible and has numerous hooks to get the job done. It tries very hard to avoid forcing you into one methodology and understands the most common approaches. Just as important for management buy-in, mature turnkey solutions are available from commercial companies such as rSmart, Longsight, and Unicon.
Commercial offerings normally include a few extra tools and, much more importantly, help and support for deployment into your own organization. Sakai can at times be complicated to integrate into the wider context of your enterprise, and it is often cheaper to buy in experience than to pay employees to learn from scratch.
The brute force aoption — not recommended in the majority of situations — is to update and query data directly...