IBM-Rice University

Vendor: IBM (NYSE: IBM)
Customer: Rice University www.rice.edu   
Vertical Markets: Education
State: Houston

Technology Used: IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, IBM Software Services

for WebSphere

Solution: Rice University, located in Houston, Texas, is a private research academy. The institution, founded in 1912, is known for its prestigious undergraduate programs and its strength in the applied sciences. Rice University has also been recognized as a pioneer in several fields, including nanotechnology and structural chemical analysis.

In order to offer students a state-of-the-art research environment, the university decided to implement the Sakai system. This open source environment, currently in use by well over 100 universities, is an extremely effective collaborative tool. The university felt that the Sakai environment would encourage students and faculty to communicate and work together. After obtaining a Shared University Research (SUR) grant from IBM, Rice implemented the Sakai environment.

After deploying the Sakai environment, the school still needed to connect educational applications into the open source platform, and they turned to IBM for help. IBM Software Services for WebSphere connected the school’s Connexions open courseware solution and the DSpace library holdings applications to the Sakai environment. Using the IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus software, the IBM team was able to permit the standardized interchange and sharing of resources within the open source infrastructure.

The Sakai environment and the connected educational applications have benefited the prestigious research university in numerous ways. Students can quickly and efficiently retrieve needed information, and faculty members can develop a course and easily make it available to a wide audience thanks to the Connexions application and the Sakai collaboration environment. The new system also offers improved standardization, and has simplified searches by replacing three distinct search tools with just one. Finally, the robust Sakai environment was implemented quite quickly, which benefited Rice University by minimizing computer downtime associated with deploying this impressive open source system. 

Further details:
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/solutions/pdfs/EDC03005-USEN-00_RiceUniversity_final_CS_Mar17-09.pdf