News

Bluenog Integrates Suite with Education Apps Including Moodle and Blackboard

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 06/09/09

Bluenog said it will extend Bluenog ICE, its suite of content management, portal development, and business intelligence software, to interface with educational support systems including SunGard Banner, Resource25, Sakai, Moodle, and Blackboard. In addition, the company's professional services division will offer consulting services to help institutional customers integrate commercial and open source applications.

"Colleges and universities are increasingly turning to commercial solutions built on open source projects, such as Bluenog ICE, to address their needs," said Jonathan B. Spira, chief analyst for research firm Basex. "Having access to professional support, customization, product updates, training and the ability to integrate with existing infrastructure is key for institutions that need to keep costs low without sacrificing functionality."

This initiative follows on the heels of Bluenog client implementations at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) in New York, and New York University's Langone Medical Center.

NYU Langone, whose deployment was completed in May 2009, will use Bluenog ICE to present rich content and transactional data to diverse audiences using the same underlying portal platform and security framework. Additionally, human resources staff at the medical center will use the suite to create, update, and publish to the institution's HR Portal on their intranet. Integration with Langone's existing environment--including application servers, .NET- and Java-based development, business intelligence, Web content management, custom security and single sign-on (SSO) solutions--will enable the portal's operation to be tailored to a user's role.

The medical center's IT staff maintains over 100 separate and distinct Web applications, many with different development environments and security interfaces. Additionally, they must continually respond to new application requests that require them to scale their infrastructure with additional servers and add high availability support. In its search for ECM solutions, Langone determined that Bluenog ICE offered the benefits of open source, such as access to source code, backed by indemnification and the comprehensive support typical of commercial solutions.

As a result of the Bluenog ICE implementation, Langone realized savings on its up-front licensing costs and additional savings on maintenance costs. The initial rollout of the new system covers the organization's leadership team and about a thousand medical students. The complete solution will be rolled out to all 15,000 employees.

Wellesley implemented Bluenog ICE in April 2009 as its central content management system.

Columbia's CIESIN began working with the Bluenog suite in October 2008 after a year-long evaluation.