Comments on: UMS portal may not cost students

By: Ron Kozlowski

Ron Kozlowski — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:42:53 +0000

It would seem to me that economically, it doesn’t make much sense to spend money to an outside company that will not in the end benefit the University. If you spent even a fraction of what it would cost for this proposed portal on an internal solution, like Synapse, it would not only benefit the University but the state as well.
It would bring national recognition to the University and the state of Maine.
Synapse which is partially built by students, can be customized for the needs of the University, might someday grow to the point that it could make money for the University and potentially become a company that would create many jobs for the state of maine. We need to start thinking of ways to not only keep money at the University of Maine but in this State. Spending money on a system that give money to a big corporation that resides in another state doesn’t help the state or the University of Maine. The University has talented faculty, staff and students that can accomplish anything they put their minds too. Isn’t it about time we used the resources in our state instead of looking beyond our borders?

By: Matthew Newman

Matthew Newman — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:39:58 +0000

First, let me say thank you to both John Gregory and Roy Turner. Speaking as someone who has worked for the DoD, the private sector, my own business, and built my own home, this idea of spending far more than $600,000 every year from here on out is a very bad one, in any economy, let alone this one. That number is just the baseline. I would wager it does not even begin to cover the myriad costs of fleshing out, maintaining, integrating, and upgrading such a system. I think Roy hits the nail on the head. We should not be asking what expensive, outside, canned product can solve our problems with the false appearance of ease and simplicity. We should be researching, asking ourselves what we have, right here, right now, that can be leveraged to create a sustainable solution to our problems. As a simple example – could you fix any of the things in your home, office, or computer environments if they broke down? We all know what costs we incur when we rely on “experts” to perform tasks we should manage ourselves. Anyone who changes their own oil understands what I am getting at. This is only the most basic level of benefit in managing our own resources. If we create technology (or any other) solutions, that are comparable to the versions available at truly ignorant “enterprise” prices, we save money. If we create truly inspired, elegant solutions that are far superior to the boring, generic, pre-packaged answers available, we can turn around and market those creations to others like us, who can understand and appreciate their value. If you create an environment that encourages such creative efforts (with more than just words), you will not only see enrollment go up, you will see more students of high caliber enroll. Our reputation could be that of a second-rate school that fails to appreciate what it has to work with, and so clamors to pay out the nose for what others produce (be it amazing or pathetic). Our school could be known as a center for brilliant minds to thrive and create, to produce the next great solutions to our seemingly endless problems. I was fortunate enough to meet a teacher who once handed me a trowel and said “I never learned anything without the trowel in my hand, so you’re going to build this, and I am going to watch you do it”. Let’s use our own, build our own, and reap our own benefits.
– proud member of the Synapse development team

By: Angie

Angie — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:48:41 +0000

It is beyond belief that the UMS would invest this sort of money into new software when they are raising tuition and simultaneously slashing faculty, ending academic programs and making it harder for students to graduate on time.

By: Roy Turner

Roy Turner — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:21:18 +0000

We should all applaud IT director John Gregory for the position he stated in this article. Unless an open-source solution is used for any portal implemented, even if it does not cost students via student fees, it will cost them. The University is extremely stressed financially at the moment and for the foreseeable future, with the impacts of projected budget cuts estimated by many to result, in the worst case, in cuts of up to 1/4 to 1/3 of all departments and programs on campus. At a time like this, millions spent for what is ultimately a convenience is unwise. I believe that students would be best served by putting up with the current, inconvenient, situation while preserving as much academic quality and choice as possible. Even better, we should instead look to open source solutions, using in-house expertise — of which there is a great deal, both at the System level and in IT, as well as in our computing-related departments (computer science, etc.) and scattered throughout other departments across campus (witness the locally-developed Synapse courseware).