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.
