Our UC Ready planning tool (an upgrade of the former Berkeley Continuity Planning Tool) has been adopted by the Kuali Foundation as its first offering in the area of disaster-preparedness. The new tool, to be called Kuali Ready, will be available in April 2010.

The Kuali Foundation is a consortium of universities that develops enterprise software for higher education, using the community-source approach.  Utilizing the programming resources of its member institutions, Kuali adopts, develops, and maintains administrative software applications.

The use of Kuali software enables potentially-huge cost savings for adopting institutions.  In addition, Kuali applications are tailored by and for higher education, and will potentially become important standards.

Kuali currently offers a financial system, a research administration system, and is developing a student services package.  Its research administration system (Kuali Coeus) is currently in use here on the Berkeley campus.  The Kuali Financial System is being installed at UC Davis, and the nascent Kuali Student Services package is being piloted here at Berkeley.

Kuali Ready will be the first application to be offered by Kuali as a hosted service in addition to furnishing the code to institutions that prefer to self-install.

Under the leadership of CIO Shel Waggener, Berkeley has formed a group of 10 universities (called the Kuali Ready Project Board) to partner in the future development of the tool under the auspices of the Kuali Foundation.  Upon release of the Kuali Ready tool in April 2010, Berkeley and the other campuses of the UC System will move all current continuity plans to the Kuali tool and utilize that tool going forward.

For further details of the Kuali Ready tool, click here.