Kuali releases Mobility Enterprise 1.0
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 18, 2011
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The Kuali Foundation is pleased to announce the public release of Kuali Mobility Enterprise 1.0, an open source framework that connects campus information and services to any mobile device. Kuali Mobility, or KMobility, is designed to process transactions securely and eliminates the need to create separate client apps for each smartphone or tablet device.
"In our institutions of higher learning, students, faculty, staff and visitors are using a growing array of devices from Apple, Blackberry, Google, HP and many other companies, and they expect to get critical information about university programs on those devices," said Brad Wheeler, IU vice president for information technology and CIO. "It makes no financial sense to write or buy separate programs for each device, so the Kuali partners are sharing costs for a next generation system that is freely available."
Kuali Mobility is the product of the collective investments of Indiana University, the University of Cambridge, Cornell University, the University of Michigan, HTC Global Services and VivanTech. IU deployed the pre-release version to 115,000 students, faculty, and staff on all eight campuses in August.
Kuali Mobility represents a third-generation approach for linking campus mobile services to any campus system (student, library, athletics, bus routes, conferences, labs, etc.) and securely conveying information for easy navigation or secure higher-stakes transactions.
The public release includes:
- The Kuali Mobile framework that leverages the best-of-breed, open source mobile platforms
- A mobile web gateway that enables higher education institutions to interact with public and/or securely authenticated services
- A mobile platform based on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, and other open source mobile projects like JQuery Mobile and PhoneGap
- The ability for mobile applications to be written, tested, packaged, and delivered to constituents through the mobile web or through an installable app for their particular mobile device via one of the application stores
As with all Kuali applications, Kuali Mobility has the strength of the Kuali Foundation, an OSI-approved license, and commercial support for implementation.
The Special Interest Group on University and College Computing Services (SIGUCCS), an association of professionals who support and manage the diverse aspects of information technology services at higher education institutions, recently awarded Indiana University "Best of Category in Computing Services Mobile Website" for its implementation of Kuali Mobility 1.0.. One judge commented: "The IU Mobile website is compatible with many smartphone devices including iPhone iOS, Android, Blackberry, Palm WebOS, Windows Mobile, Opera Mobile/Mini, Firefox Mobile and other modern browsers. The site provides finger-friendly layouts and graphically compelling yet lightweight pages. Information and services within the site provide a coherent, intuitive and overall satisfying user experience."
The Mobility community is already focused on the creation of the 1.1 release, which will center on performance improvements, improved publishing for deploying tools into the framework, a clearinghouse process and product for sharing tools and bundles, and more tools.
To download Kuali Mobility 1.0, go to http://www.kuali.org/mobility
About Kuali
The Kuali Foundation is a non-profit organization that coordinates the efforts of colleges and universities to develop and sustain administrative software to meet the needs of all sizes of higher education institutions, from small colleges to large research universities. The Kuali Foundation began in 2004 as a cooperative effort among partners and a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop an open-source financial system. Success with the Kuali Financial System led to additional pooled investment projects, including Kuali Coeus for Research Administration, Kuali Student, Kuali Rice, Kuali Open Library Environment, Kuali People Management for the Enterprise, Kuali Mobility Enterprise and Kuali Ready, with coordination by the independent, not-for-profit Kuali Foundation, Inc. The software developed by Kuali projects is available, without fee, for anyone to use or modify under the Educational Community License. See http://kuali.org for more information.
