Two main kinds of integration strategies can be considered for Sakai: synchronization and external service access. The synchronization approach is the one recommended by the developers of CHEF, led by Charles Severance, based on past experience. Sychronization can be accomplished in two ways: use a plug-in API below the Common Service implementations to pull information into the Sakai environment, or create a process above the Common Services that pulls information from an external service and pushes it into Sakai using the administrative aspects of the service. External service access in some cases may introduce unacceptable delays that degrade overall Sakai performance. Other cases exist where either performance is not an issue (ie, acceptable delays), or the external service is very responsive (such as a custom database cluster).