University of Twente

We sure have some challenges.... This is just a quick write-up to give you an idea.
First of all i would like to point out that one of the main reasons our university chose to start piloting with Sakai is because of the serious lack of integration between our current systems that we deploy. Students have complained about this over and over again. And we need to improve dramatically on this. Sakai has some serious promises in this area. We use TeleTOP as our VLE (quite succesfull!) and we are using Oracle Portal (not so happy with this) for our portal needs. We have various homegrown webbased systems for grading, administration etc.

So, with this little backgrounder, let met share my main concerns with you.

1/ Sharing/integrating/pushing/synchronizing (choose your favorite wording) course-related information from our homegrown system to Sakai. Right now, we don't have this at all. We have conducted a technical trial with this challenge. This trial was succesfull; we created a demonstrator that shows pushing info from our course information system to Sakai to automate the task of creating a Sakai site. We relied heavily on the existing Sakai webservices (in Sakai 2.3.1). The XCRI specification (from England) was used to assist us in this effort.
2/ (just like Stockholm) Calender synchronisation: how should we do this? No real idea yet. We are a MS Exchange (version 2003 I believe) shop with regard to email, agenda, contacts etc. All students and staff are provided with these services. But how do we integrate with the Schedule in Sakai.
3/ Some more stuff regarding the Resources tool and the Assignments tool. Check our wiki on this. Especially the fact that we cannot have group assignments within Sakai is a real hindrance.
4/ Do we need a portal? Our current one is ok, but not really performant.

Above all this, we are also starting a very interesting endeavour right now regarding a new Student Information System (SIS), which most likely will not be homegrown.