New Kuali Infrastructure

Since Kuali Days last November, the Kuali Foundation staff has been working overtime on a set of new infrastructure that will have a very positive impact on Kuali's collaboration environment. Next week, everybody who has an account on a Kuali system (e.g. Confluence, Sakai, Jira, SVN) will receive the first of a series of emails with important information and action items that will help the community through these changes. Please pay close attention to these emails so that you can continue to use Kuali's tools without any disruption of service. To be sure not to miss any important communications from the Kuali Foundation, I recommend that you add an email filter to prevent anything sent from @kuali.org from going into your spam box.

In this blog post, I will provide a high-level overview of some of the new infrastructure and our migration plan.

The heart of our new infrastructure is what we are calling Kuali Information System (KIS), which serves a number of functions. KIS is a web-based directory where you can find contact information for people associated with Kuali, explore the project teams of the various Kuali Projects, find Collaboration and Contribution groups to work with, manage your own contact information, discover new resources, and request additional access to Kuali resources. Kuali team leads can manage their team members through KIS.

In addition, KIS is responsible for the identity management tasks necessary to implement Single Sign-On, probably our community's most desired functionality. KIS gathers data from Kuali's systems like Jira, Sakai and Confluence, and uses heuristics to reconcile user accounts from these different systems into a single user account. In other words, KIS maps your various user accounts to a single user ID and password, an essential step in setting up Single Sign-On.

KIS also pushes data out to an LDAP server. Shortly, you will be able to easily configure a connection to Kuali's LDAP server through your Mail client (e.g. Microsoft Outlook, Mail.app), which will allow you to look-up Kuali people directly through your email program.

Lastly, KIS pushes Kuali's teams and team members to Kuali's Google Apps account, which includes sophisticated email, grouping, calendaring, document sharing, code review, site creation tools and more. Although new Kuali projects, as well as Collaboration and Contribution teams, may start using this new infrastructure right away, existing projects will likely take some time, working with the Foundation to create a migration plan that does not adversely impact their development schedule.

We are very excited to start using our new infrastructure. The first step, which we will take next week, will be to ask all Kuali account holders to log-in to KIS and create their Single Sign-On password. We will give the community a few weeks to do this before we move any resources behind Single Sign-On.

Throughout the Spring, we will move our resources behind Single Sign-On one-by-one.

At the same time, we will be making minor changes that will be communicated, including changing a number of the listserv email addresses to follow a standardized naming convention.

Please keep your eyes peeled for our forthcoming communications! I encourage you to leave feedback in the comments below, or to contact me directly.