COmanage Developers List

[Steven Carmody <>]

from the most recent sakai newsletter...

5. Longsight Announces Partnership with BigBlueButton

The Longsight Group announced a new partnership with Blindside Networks, 
developers of BigBlueButton (http://bigbluebutton.org), the open source 
web conferencing system expressly designed for education. Through this 
partnership, Longsight is providing to their Sakai clients full support 
for BigBlueButton's integrated synchronous collaboration that includes 
live presentations with a whiteboard, desktop sharing, web-cam displays 
and audio using either voice over IP (VoIP) or telephone-based services.

Longsight hosts and supports BigBlueButton with Blindside Networks 
(http://blindsidenetworks.com), providing monitoring and expert support 
services to ensure reliability.

"We're currently hosting BigBlueButton for fourteen colleges in the U.S. 
who are discovering how productive this suite of synchronous tools can 
be in support of teaching and learning," reports Scott Siddall, Partner 
at The Longsight Group. "BigBlueButton has exploded onto the scene 
following the Sakai Conference in mid-June and Blackboard's recent 
announcement of their move into this market. We are thrilled to be 
providing our clients with truly open source web conferencing services," 
added Siddall. BigBlueButton is fully integrated into Sakai thanks to 
the Sakai community members Adrian Fish and Nuno Fernandes -- another 
example of the power of community source applications.

Blindside Network's CEO, Fred Dixon said, "Working with a global 
community of developers, we developed BigBlueButton to enable 
universities and colleges to offer a high-quality learning experience to 
remote students." Dixon added, "Longsight has a track-record of 
providing first-class support to their customers. We are pleased to 
partner closely with Longsight to ensure their customers can fully 
leverage BigBlueButton."

About Longsight

Longsight is a leading provider of hosting and support services for open 
source software. The company delivers exceptionally reliable hosting 
services and high quality, comprehensive support for Sakai (learning 
management), Drupal (portals and content management) and DSpace 
(institutional repositories). Longsight enjoys a national reputation for 
understanding the business of education based on decades of experience 
in higher education IT management. For more information, please visit 
http://www.longsight.com.

About Blindside Networks

Blindside Networks, located in Ottawa, Canada, is dedicated to helping 
universities, colleges, and private sector educational institutions 
offer a high-quality learning experience to remote students. We created 
and provide commercial support for BigBlueButton, an open source web 
conferencing system for distance education. For more information, please 
visit http://blindsidenetworks.com/.

About BigBlueButton

BigBlueButton is an open source system for synchronous education. It 
provides teachers and students integrated sharing of slides, video, 
audio, chat, whiteboard and desktops. It's built using over fifteen open 
source components, runs on Macintosh, Unix, and PC computers, and is 
backed by a commercial and open source community that cares about good 
design and a streamlined user experience. For more information, please 
visit http://bigbluebutton.org/.

Scott Siddall