News & Events

Longsight announces partnership to provide BigBlueButton web conferencing services

The Longsight Group announced today a new partnership with Blindside Networks, developers of BigBlueButton, the open source web conferencing system expressly designed for education. Through this partnership, Longsight is providing to their Sakai clients full support for BigBlueButton’s integrated synchronous collaboration that includes live presentations with a whiteboard, desktop sharing, web-cam displays and audio using either voice over IP (VoIP) or telephone-based services.

BigBLueButton

Longsight hosts and supports BigBlueButton with Blindside Networks providing monitoring and expert support services to ensure reliability.

“We’re currently hosting BigBlueButton for fourteen colleges in the US who are discovering how productive this suite of synchronous tools can be in support of teaching and learning,” reports Scott Siddall, Partner at The Longsight Group. “BigBlueButton has exploded onto the scene following the Sakai Conference in mid-June and Blackboard’s recent announcement of their move into this market. We are thrilled to be providing our clients with truly open source web conferencing services” added Siddall. BigBlueButton is fully integrated into Sakai thanks to the Sakai community members Adrian Fish and Nuno Fernandes – another example of the power of community source applications.

Blindside Network’s CEO, Fred Dixon, said “Working with a global community of developers, we developed BigBlueButton to enable universities and colleges to offer a high-quality learning experience to remote students.” Fred Dixon added, “Longsight has a track-record of providing first-class support to their customers. We are pleased to partner closely with Longsight to ensure their customers can fully leverage BigBlueButton.”

About Longsight

Longsight is a leading provider of hosting and support services for open source software. The company delivers exceptionally reliable hosting services and high quality, comprehensive support for Sakai (learning management), Drupal (portals and content management) and DSpace (institutional repositories). Longsight enjoys a national reputation for understanding the business of education based on decades of experience in higher education IT management. For more information, please visit http://www.longsight.com.

About Blindside Networks

Blindside Networks, located in Ottawa, Canada, is dedicated to helping universities, colleges, and private sector educational institutions offer a high-quality learning experience to remote students. We created and provide commercial support for BigBlueButton, an open source web conferencing system for distance education.
For more information, please visit http://blindsidenetworks.com/.

About BigBlueButton

BigBlueButton is an open source system for synchronous education. It provides teachers and students integrated sharing of slides, video, audio, chat, whiteboard and desktops. It's built using over fifteen open source components, runs on Mac, Unix, and PC computers, and is backed by a commercial and open source community that cares about good design and a streamlined user experience.
For more information, please visit http://bigbluebutton.org/.

July 9, 2010

Longsight welcomes Wellesley College to the Sakai community

The Longsight Group, a leading provider of support for open source software, announced that Wellesley College has selected Longsight to host and support Sakai for the College’s collaboration and learning management system.

In announcing the selection of Sakai and Longsight to the campus, Wellesley’s Vice President for Information Services and College Librarian, Micheline Jedrey, noted that Sakai “…has many plusses: a strong set of tools and a strong vendor.”

Wellesley College staff consulted with the campus community throughout their investigation and selection process that included a Request for Information and Request for Proposals process. A variety of products and vendors were considered. Wellesley has been using Open Text’s FirstClass suite.

Veronica Branstrader, the College’s director of planning and communication, reports that "Wellesley is excited to roll out Sakai with Longsight's support, especially given the confidence and enthusiasm shown by their current clients, who voiced their eagerness to welcome us into the "Longsight family."

Sakai will be hosted in a highly-redundant, load-balanced and failover configuration at Longsight’s two data centers in Ohio. Longsight’s comprehensive support includes authentication and student information integration, a “five-nines” service level agreement (99.999% uptime) at the application level, proactive monthly support calls, customization, onsite and online training and 24x7 support.

Sakai is one component in Wellesley’s Unified Communications (UC) Project, a highly integrated effort to enable all members of the College community to work productively now and in the future. Other elements of the UC Project include Zimbra for email and calendaring, AVST CallXpress for voice mail and messaging and Luminis for the campus portal.

About Wellesley College

Founded in 1870, Wellesley has a global reputation for providing an excellent liberal arts education for women. Within this traditional liberal arts framework, the Wellesley curriculum is dynamic and responsive to social change and new fields of study. One of the first liberal arts colleges to establish a separate computer science department and computer science major, Wellesley remains at the forefront of technological development.

About The Longsight Group

Longsight is a leading provider of hosting and support services for open source software. The company delivers exceptionally reliable hosting services and high quality, comprehensive support for Sakai (learning management), Drupal (portals and content management) and DSpace (institutional repositories). Longsight enjoys a national reputation for understanding the business of education based on decades of experience in higher education IT management. For more information, please visit http://longsight.com

January 30, 2010.