From the
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when I was in University I used PINE
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files:
Lots of activity this week for open source collaboration in the education market. Tomorrow (Wednesday Oct 29th). Collaboration vendor DimDim is expected to announce its Dimdim Virtual Classroom Pack which will let 10 teachers host up to 40 students at a time in their own hosted, customizable web-based classroom.
DimDim is an interesting open source startup that is a competitive play to what Cisco does with WebEx. One of DimDim’s investor’s is the co-founder of Yahoo’s Zimbra division, Satish Dharmaraj.
So not too surprisingly, DimDim is also expected to announce tomorrow a Zimbra Collaboration Suite Zimlet, to enable unified collaboration across campus-wide email systems. Zimlets are the Zimbra Web Service technology that allows for service integration and mashups. Zimbra itself today rolled out a hosted offering for the education market.
While I suspect that DimDim and Zimbra usage has already been done on campuses prior to this formal Zimlet rollout, no doubt this will make it easier. More importantly it could be the beginning of a new broader open source sales momentum in the collaboration space.