SunGard Higher Education and its customers have launched a Community Source Initiative — a  vendor-supported community source forum dedicated to higher education Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.

The initiative is designed  to bring together the insights and experience of SunGard' extensive user community for the benefit of all institutions; make functionality available faster; and help ensure product quality through functional and technical review.

In the past, customers that developed custom features on their own incurred the initial cost of development as well as the ongoing expense of maintenance.  There was not a secure process to share developments with others or discover whether a need had already been met by another institution’s development effort. Through the Community Source initiative, SunGard Higher Education customers can contribute to and benefit from other individual customer innovations.

A customer-led board prioritises submissions and decides which would be valuable additions to the baseline versions of SunGard Higher Education products. In contrast to a traditional open source model, new functionality will be production tested and then supported by SunGard Higher Education.

“The Community Source Initiative leverages the expertise and collaborative goodwill of our far-reaching user community to bring more and better solutions to market faster while helping ensure the quality of those solutions through structured review; and it eases the institution’s burden of continually upgrading local enhancements,” stated Jack Kramer, SVP, client satisfaction, SunGard Higher Education.-TradeArabia News Service