ITWeb :Unisa embraces Microsoft: “[ Johannesburg, 3 December 2008 ] – At a time when many public organisations are migrating to open source solutions – the University of SA (Unisa) has chosen to embrace Microsoft. From 2009, registered students at Unisa will be required to sign up for a Microsoft-provided e-mail service. The free e-mail system – myLife – will be the only system Unisa will use to communicate with its students. This marks a move away from the university’s Sakai community source platform – myUnisa – which the university runs on a Linux platform.”

(Via car hire bulgariaGoogle.)

Based on the article at least (not having talked with the folks at UNISA about this item) it’s hard to tie moving to Live@EDU for email to moving away from Sakai. If anything, having guaranteed email accounts (which it sounds like may not currently be the case) seems likely to enhance core services like announcements, email notification, mailing lists and others.

PR-GB.com… News from origin – Hobsons Debuts Full CAS Integration at CGS Annual Meeting: “”

(Via Google.)

Another vendor server higher-ed supporting CAS out of the box can only be a good thing easing integration across the board.

Don’t Stop at Gmail | The Hoya: “Georgetown has never been on the cutting edge of technology. Changes to our e-mail system and wireless service have come slowly, and the university is still in the process of revamping data security following a major security breach last semester. Here is an opportunity to cut costs without sacrificing user satisfaction, to participate in a dynamic programming project involving some of the nation’s top universities and to shake off our dependence on a for-profit vendor for support and updates. Georgetown has the chance, for once, to be in the forefront of campus technology, and this is an opportunity we can’t afford to miss.”

(Via Google.)

Post from the Georgetown school paper makes the case for transitioning from Blackboard to an Open-Source LMS, and specifically mentions Sakai

Hmm… been a while since I vanity blogged

I was using my Mac with the Universal Access panel’s VoiceOver turned on (which is really annoying if you don’t tweak the verbosity settings) as part of some accessibility testing that I was doing with Sakai.

An interesting side-effect of my testing came when Microsoft’s MyDay panel came up (their Entourage 2008 summary panel). When you hover over the panel, Voiceover reveals that the panel is actually mostly an HTML content area. Surprised to see a desktop-centric company like Microsoft leveraging web technology in a rich client.

I do wonder though – as interfaces back-track from the standard widget look & feels that were the hallmark of the original Mac and Windows – the web makes as much sense as any other platform for non-standard OS UI design. Probably more so than others, if for no reason than there’s a horde of graphic and UA individuals familiar with HTML, CSS, JS, et. al.

Particularly given trends for integrating in-line help (per the excellent Quickbook article) this seems like something that’s likely to continue/expand as a trend.