Chandler and Higher Ed

Last December, Ira Fuchs of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation invited a group of people from the member institutions of the Common Solutions Group to meet with Mitch Kapor to talk about the possible intersection of interest between our enterprise needs and the Chandler personal information manager that the Open Source Applications Foundation is developing.

That led to several months of intensive discussion which have culminated in the agreement to develop a version of Chandler, known as Westwood, specifically designed to meet the enterprise requirements for higher ed, under grants totalling $2.75 million from Mellon and the CSG institutions. I am nicely quoted in the announcement of the grants, and I'm pleased to say that I will be one of the people on the advisory board helping to coordinate this work. As the quote says:

"Having a freely distributable, open source PIM that will support relevant standard protocols and connect to our existing enterprise systems will be a tremendous help in our institution. The campus has been trying for years to find good solutions for integrating calendaring and messaging that can really be supported for hundreds of thousands of users in scalable and cost-effective ways. We look forward to working with the great OSAF staff to achieve these goals."