Live demos

After all your hard work, here is some good news: there are several live Sakai demonstrations scattered across the Internet, where you can get a free account and play around. The advantage is that there is no startup cost in time or effort; the disadvantage, for the adventurous, is that you do not get the opportunity to play around with any of the administration tools. Further, the Sakai instances tend to be slightly older than the currently available demonstration version.

Following is a screenshot of the home page of the rSmart offering. rSmart (http://www.rsmart.com/sakai) provides commercial support and an enhanced Sakai instance with extra tools and some well-thought-out tweaks to the GUI.

rSmart contributes many enhancements back to the community and is an active supporter of the community effort. An rSmart employee, Nate Angell, is currently on the board of directors of the Sakai Foundation.

Live demos tend to be supported by commercial companies like Serensoft, rSmart, Longsight, and Unicon. These companies also supply hosted solutions for those wanting to run Sakai services, such as a set of course sites, but aren't yet ready to install Sakai in production for themselves. For example, at the time of writing, Serensoft has an introductory program for piloting single course sites with up to 50 students. This enables small organizations to kick the tires and test the engine without having to take many risks. If you are motivated, it is well worth comparing the commercial offerings (http://sakaiproject.org/commercial-support) with the default demonstration mentioned in this chapter.