With their budgets under increasing pressure, many campus IT directors are considering open source projects for the first time. On the face of it, the savings can be significant. Commercial emergency-planning software can cost upward of six figures, for example, whereas the open source Kuali Ready might run as little as $15,000 per year when…

If there's anyone in the academic IT arena taking seriously the possibility that campus identity management (IdM) may one day meld with consumer apps, it's Nate Klingenstein, one of the founding members of the Shibboleth Project (the open source project providing architecture and policy structures for managing single sign-on access to resources).…

Just a few years ago, virtual worlds were credited with the power to transform the universe. Used since the late 1990s in military and medical applications, virtual worlds first gained mainstream media attention when Linden Lab released Second Life in 2003. While other worlds, including open source environments, have launched since then (examples…