It was just as enjoyable to hear about the approach that UMW's Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies is taking to the evaluation and acquisition of enterprise software.

If you're working in a higher-ed IT shop, you're likely supporting one of several course management systems, Blackboard and WebCT being the two names that come up most often. But you're also acutely aware of the educational relevance of blogs, wikis, and related applications and services sprouting everywhere. This stuff is mostly open source software. There are vendors who will package it for you or deliver commercial alternatives, but the UMW team wanted to work in a more exploratory and iterative way.

So they hooked up with a hosting service that's providing them with what they provocatively describe as a sandbox. In their case the hosting service is BlueHost (http://www.bluehost.com/), one of many that supports an administrative package calle d cPanel (http://www.cpanel.net/) and -- as an add-on to cPanel -- an automated installer called Fantastico. Using Fantastico, it's easy to configure and deploy various flavors of open source Weblog, help desk, survey, wiki, or calendar applications.

Of course you can create your own sandbox, but that means you'll spend way too much time configuring and deploying. You'd rather invest that time on higher-order tasks: connecting people to the software, learning what works for them, building composites tailored to their unique requirements.

In terms of the ability to work at this level, UMW was, by its own admission, behind the curve two years ago. Nor could it afford to spend the way some universities do. But Assistant VP for Teaching and Learning Technologies Gardner Campbell has turned these weaknesses into advantages. From BlueHost's perspective, cPanel and Fantastico may only be part of a defensive strategy to minimize tech support. For UMW, however, it's an opportunity to get up to speed quickly with an array of potentially useful applications.