Kevin Foote

First and foremost is the community behind Sakai. The community forming behind this product is second to none. The major Universities that are backing this project are well invested in creating a product that tops others in its field. You would somewhat expect this from places like Stanford and Cambridge. But, the really cool part is that while these large institutions are working on the fore-front of the technology envelope, a small place like Marist College is able to contribute real needed pieces into the core Sakai code base with others reviewing and giving feedback.

This community is great!

Second is Sakai's API. A-P-I! Yes, real software that can be integrated into an Enterprise comes with an API that is well documented.

Third we have an application that is not just some scripts talking to each other. The Sakai application is composed of plug-able Java based tools that work on a common base architecture. To further this Sakai is being migrated into a kernel -> tool architecture with the base being able to be deployed separate from the tools which run on top of it. This is cool stuff.

Fourth is the very fine grained control over permissions within the system. While there is a slight learning curve to Sakai's permissions, the capabilities this model provides the institution are quite expansive.

The ability of users to share portions of their internal site is one example. Example say every user can have a wiki. From that the user can allow / disallow viewing of their wiki or portions of their own wiki..

Fifth is Sakai's ability to adapt.

Who knows how long the current LMS model will last? No one really. The really cool thing about Sakai is that the people writing the code know this. That is one of the big pushes that drives the plug-able nature of the source. Perhaps Sakai won't be the end-all as far as LMS software goes but the adaptable nature of the code will allow portions of a Sakai site to be used in substitute-name-here system and visa-verse.