Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to openACES vs Blackboard

Hi MIchael,
I am in Australia so I would not be able to help for the overall project, but we woul dbe able to do help on specific modules. I am already porting some of the modules required in OpenACES. I am also in the process of collecting info to do a new competitive analysis. Regretably ACES has never appeared on the several comparissons I have found so far including:

1. Center for Curriculm transfer in Canada.
2. FutureU an old report (Jan 200) of the most popular systems.

I think that OpenACS has a number of functionalities that those products do not have, particularly those related to:

1. content management (have a look at this document I wrote on the subject)
2. workflows,
3. ecommerce,
4. costumer resource management (where the customers would be your students)

It is a toolkit, although you can use some of its modules out of the box. Due to its origins it is much stronger in taking the University as a community, but I think it is not as strong (yet) on teaching and learning tools. With regrads to your requirements (beware that I do not have experience using ACES)
1.User authentication via LDAP or kerberos
ACES has an LDAP module. It is now being ported to 4.x
2.IMS/AICC-standard course management
I believe it is not AICC compliant, but in the original requirement document it was already mentioned. I believe this is already a high development priority.
3.framework for supporting a variety of content formats (mostly via browser plug-ins)
I haven't tried it, but I heard that dreamweaver has an adaptor for embedding tcl code. Any other kind of file can be uploaded using forms.
4.virtual classroom
I am not sure what you mean with this. Each course has a news center, file storage, calendar, etc... more than you normally have in a real classroom.
5.assessment 'engine'
I know it is implemented using the Survey engine, but I haven't ried it, and I do not know how good is the instrictor support for grading and so on.
6.community portal
You can be sure that this will be MUCH better than any of the other products.
7.ASP solution (not required but a nice to have)
Since it is open source you can deploy it as you like. You can have one main installation or each department can have their own. You could even offer e-learning solution hosting to other school.
If you are looking for people to host it for you. I believe that there are several companies offering this service (furfly?)
There is a demo running at aces.arsdigita.com. I believ it is a very old version fo what aD installed in Sloan. I understand that all the bugs have been fixed and Sloan is plannning to use it as the main delivery platform next semester.
As I said I am working collecting info on this so I would apreciate help from people with more ACES experience.
cheers