The University of Michigan, MIT, Stanford, Indiana University, and now over 65 other universities have come together in an international effort to develop the next generation of software infrastructure and tools to support research and teaching.

This work will include:

• A Complete Course Management System
• A Research Support Collaboration System
• An Enterprise Services-based Portal

Sakai software includes the Sakai Framework plus a set of Sakai Tools that together form the Sakai Enterprise Bundle.

Some of the drivers of Sakai include:

• These are core infrastructures at our Universities
• There are Economic advantages to core schools and partners
• Build on higher education values - open, sharing, building the commons - core support for collaboration technology.
• Leverage experience - teaching, research are our core competencies, collaboration is essential.
• Maintain institutional capacity, independence
• Ability to rapidly innovate - move our tools within/among HE institutions rapidly
• A desire to be interoperable with other systems using industry standards
• Desire to harvest research advances and faculty innovation in teaching quickly