Sakai
Sakai is an online Collaboration and Learning Environment. It can be used to support teaching and learning, ad hoc group collaboration, portfolios and research collaboration, according to its website. it is the successor to the CHEF, OnCourse and Stellar systems which were all developed by R1 institutions. It is built using the J2EE environment.
It is open source. Users can voluntarily join the Sakai Foundation and if they do so and pay dues (about $5,000/yr for us) they can participate in foundation governance. However, use and development of the software are open to all.
For a list of functions available and in development , please visit: sakaiproject.org and click on "About" on the left side. I spent most of my time dipping into their support site (sakaipedia) and other discussion areas.
Sakaipedia is a manual/help source in development. It still has lots of blanks waiting to be filled in -- which doesn't mean the info is not out there, it just hasn't been gathered yet. The community seems very active and helpful -- I got the impression of people talking to each other both on the technical and conceptual level.
There is a lot of talk comparing Sakai and other systems from which I took away that Sakai is seen as having more depth than Moodle, but being more difficult and more "designed for the big sites". "However, there isn't any reason why a novice administrator shouldn't be able to deploy Sakai if the Administration tools get some Love." (in this context, not sure what LOVE is)
Sakai users say that it can be used as "enterprise group space for courses and research groups".
There is a lot of discussion which takes the form of "we are working toward", "we want to be able to" which looks to future developments in a very positive way, but also indicates a system that may not have finished its basic set of tools to the users satisfaction. Since we have a year to make a decision, this may not be a problem by then.
There is also talk about interoperability between Sakai and Moodle - perhaps using Moodle as the course managment part of Sakai in some way. this indicates that if we choose one of these systems we may eventually get the benefits of both.
Transition -- I found an article about moving from Blackboard to Sakai, but not WebCT. Again, not an indication that this does not exist, just that it is not yet in the Sakaipedia and I have not finished searching.
There are several users in our area, one of them is a comparison school:
CMU, Walsh, Hiram, Lake Erie College, Penn State, Franklin University and Ohio Learning Network. cornell, Syracuse uinveristy
Finally, for now, I found a webpage comparing several systems which I will forward to James tomorrow.