The document summarizes key learnings from Educause and Caudit Study Tours in the United States, including: - Major themes at Educause included collaboration/web 2.0 tools, email outsourcing, and identity management. Windows Live @edu and Google Apps were highlighted as email outsourcing options. - Site visits included learning about Sun's Honeycomb digital preservation platform, Blackbox modular data centers, and Sunspot minimalist computers for teaching programming. - Microsoft and Apple presentations focused on collaboration and virtualization respectively. VMWare demonstrated storage virtualization and client virtualization. - Emerging technologies like identity management, cloud computing, and learning technologies were shaping many companies

1. Educause and Caudit Study Tour so what do you learn in two weeks in the States?

2. Educause and Caudit Study Tour Educause largest IT in Edu conference in the world Caudit Study Tour opportunity to visit major US vendors on home turf

3. Educause In Seattle three days many parallel streams impossible to summarise

4. Educause - main themes What to do about collaboration and web 2.0 Email outsourcing Identity management

5. Collaboration Many US universities struggling with impact of collaboration (at best group learning - at worst sharing work) Real problem to some universities Widespread ignorance of wikis, blogs and collaboration tools

6. Collaboration Some interest in LMS’s and group learning No real understanding/nothing outstanding

7. Email outsourcing Two contenders windows live @edu google apps Both promise much the same, email, shared document editing, blogging, some collaboration tools

8. Windows live@edu more than just email full details of offering at http://get.live.com/edu email, simple word processing, online filestore, sharing, blogging

9. Windows live@edu Currently not platform independent or Web2.0 Users need to download applets and run them Next version will be properly web based and …

10. Windows live@edu Email integration with exchange coming in 2008 to allow students on windows live to share calendars with staff of ‘real’ exchange https://www.exchangelabs.com/ googling for exchange labs is a good idea

11. Google Apps for Education Email Presentation tools Blogging Shared document and spreadsheet editing http://www.google.com/a/edu/

12. Windows live vs Google Apps Not a lot of difference in functionality Both offer advertising free email with university logo’s Alumni get to keep account but get advertising Vendors want to snare customer base Example: http://www.it.northwestern.edu/stucollab/

13. Identity Mangement Everyone’s fining it hard Everyone has the same issues we do Nice example from Temple on forcing password changes : http://www.temple.edu/tusecure/index.htm

14. Other Cool stuff

15. Zotero reference manager plug in for firefox 2.0 replaces furl, end note, digg and the rest of them http://www.zotero.org

16. Utilikilts Seattle was not totally normal www.utilikilts.com

17. Caudit Study Tour Fairly intense experience Lot of material under NDA Going to concentrate on highlights

18. Sun Honeycomb Blackbox Sunspot

19. Honeycomb (Storagetek 5800) Sun’s digital preservation platform Purpose designed for an object store and index engine & database http://www.sun.com/emrkt/educonnection/newsletter/1107eduinsight.html?cid=e3661 http://www.sun.com/storagetek/disk_systems/enterprise/5800/index.xml

20. Blackbox data centre in a shipping container http://www.sun.com/emrkt/blackbox/index.jsp Coming to Canberra http://au.sun.com/events/blackbox/index.jsp?cid=922602

21. Sunspot minimalist java computers for teaching programming aim is for a logo style experience http://www.sunspotworld.com/

22. Microsoft Microsoft briefing centre also have the collaboration religion

23. Microsoft Collaboration services need identity services policy based rbac model incompatible with silo basd identity/application provision windows live id www.identityblog.com

24. Microsoft Virtualisation seen as the way forward increasing resources put into their virtualisation product aim is to beat VmWare

25. Apple fairly bland - a lot of “we’ve got shiny things” and not a lot of content

26. Apple Internal IT low number of people per box extreme standardisation with some choice café style pick list interoperability reduces support load

27. ItunesU major effort to play in lecture content space itunesU podcast prducer

28. VmWare Engineer led company new things site recovery manager to automate workflow improved storage granularity to move vmfs’s between storage pools

29. VmWare storage granularity increases resilience vmfs allows stores to be moved on the fly virtual data centre real time capacity management

30. VmWare increasing interest in client virtualisation pc’s not strategic - desktop environment is eg pano - http://www.panologic.com/

31. Google drinking from the firehose high content presentation

32. Google Cloud computing model use of google apps internally also interested in id management google uses shibboleth for some authentication processes and helped shib work with SAML2 and Liberty

33. Stanford University has had a formative input into a lot of these companies many are stanford spin offs

34. Stanford Stanford still has a key role in developing new technologies including learning technologies

35. Stanford not everything is hi tech technology enables - not an end in itself flexible spaces to allow experimentation laptops without power are dead weights

36. Palo alto again full of hi tech spin offs from stanford also still a kind of nice university town - st andrews without sleet or oxford without rain

37. Lockss/Clockss ANU is going to be signing up to clocks, took the opportunity to meet up with the people involved http://www.lockss.org/lockss/Home

38. Odd cool and other stuff

39. Parc VMWare’s HQ is opposite the original Xerox Parc didn’t get to go in tho’ :-(

40. Alexander Steak House America is the land of meat came back feeling I would moo if poked Apple took us to this upmarket steak house with a display of dead cow parts in the foyer

41. Conclusions Collaboration, web 2.0 and the rest increasingly important id management is key to a lot of this less and less about hardware, more and more abstracted away from hardware and OS

42. where can I get a copy copies of the presentation are available from: http://au.geocities.com/moncur_d/educause_caudit.ppt

43. disclaimer none of these pictures are mine -they are either sourced from flickr or from company websites. They remain © the original owners