Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Will Dr. OpenACS survive? Or why I stopped worrying and learned to love the .LRN consortium?

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69: Re: Will Dr. OpenACS survive? Or why I stopped worrying and learned to love the .LRN consortium? (response to 1)
Posted by Jeff Davis on 03/06/05 10:01 PM
Here is sakai versus openacs from the standpoint of grants.

I would think since we have heirarchical permissions, permissions inheritence, nested groups and relational segments I doubt there is anything the Sakai crud implementation offers that we don't already do (or could do reasonably easily).

Having looked at the realms bit, it's also clear that we are not the only ones saddled with a cryptic "advanced admin" interface.

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70: Re: Re: Will Dr. OpenACS survive? Or why I stopped worrying and learned to love the .LRN consortium? (response to 69)
Posted by John Norman on 03/06/05 11:44 PM
OK, I may drop out of this soon, because I don't want to be part of a Sakai vs. OpenACS debate, but I will make one more point referring back to the merging of OpenACS and dotLRN.

Worksite setup starts by asking: are you setting up a course site or a project site? This is the type of integration I would have liked to have seen with OpenACS/dotLRN. Also the illustration for Sakai shows the permissions applied locally within a course or project, not sitewide (which I think is what I am seeing in the OpenACS picture). And finally, I said we hadn't upgraded so I'm a couple of years out of date. Maybe we were wimps not to keep up, but one way or another we picked up the impression that it we might risk introducing bugs if we did.

There is plenty that is wrong with Sakai and many risks to the project. If we had had this from OpenACS/dotLRN 2 years ago, we would have been locked in by now. For established campus-wide systems switching costs are substantial. Our Blackboard users don't want to switch to CourseWork and our CourseWork users don't want to switch to Blackboard.