A community college IT manager or director tries to keep business relationships at arm's length when he deals with hardware vendors. Possibly, he has little interaction with vendors, or if he does, maybe he prefers to simply bounce from vendor to vendor if service, support, or performance is disappointing. (In the minds of many IT managers, the…

It's near-impossible to think about course management systems (CMS) without thinking about innovation, collaboration, and the sharing of ideas across institutions and even from vendor to vendor. Yet, "the next step" in CMS now means distinctly different things to various colleges and universities as, going forward, they consider their…

Finding the perfect vendor partner for any campus initiative takes more than patience and planning; it takes an open mind. In the case of the two institutions and their software initiative leaders profiled in this article, a careful assessment of need--coupled with a good deal of out-of-the-box thinking--led to innovative approaches to vendor…