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 OS, or Linux. However, why would you deploy Sakai in the larger organizational context in the first place?
No man is an island and no collaboration and 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, injects services into tools, and talks to the 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 integration with other software on campus. If desired, Sakai web services can therefore play their part in a wider enterprise or service-oriented architecture.
Sakai supports standards such as IMS BasicLTI that allows tools to be shared easily between different learning systems if they support the same standard.
To create, modify, or delete users, courses, and groups externally, Sakai has integration points called providers. These allow relatively easy incorporation into your own administration systems.
Sakai is not going away any time soon. It has easily passed the critical user-base mass for long-term growth.
Note
Leon Raijmann, an educationalist and a top-level manager at the University of Amsterdam, further discusses management buy-in factors in Chapter 15,A Crib Sheet for Selling Sakai to Traditional Management
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.