I'm becoming more aware of the fact that one reason universities need to charge those tuitions is to pay licensing fees to private vendors who provide them with such basic services as the ability to store and schedule classes, record student enrollment and grades, record instructors etc. The catalog needs to be published on-line. There might be a lot of extended education options, e.g. non-credit courses open to anyone willing to sign up. Some of these proprietary programs are pretty old, lack features departments need, and so various intermediating applications grow up around the edges to fill in the gaps. Maybe the big dino system doesn't record student evaluations for example, or keep track of which courses are in the pipeline, but still haven't found a place in the sun. One would think that universities in particular, which pride themselves on having advanced knowledge of state of the art skills, would band together in various consortia to pool resources and "eat their own dog food" as it were. A school that teaches medicine actually practices medicine (the "teaching hospital"). Shouldn't schools that teach computer science and business administration actually walk the talk in some way? Maybe many of them do, I don't actually know. To outsource something so core to one's business, to pay licensing fees while not having the power to make design modifications, just seems more than a tad on the ironic side. It's like a bank outsourcing everything it does around money. I realize not every college or university wants to reinvent the wheel around something so basic, but I do wonder to what extent there's some open source sharing going on, around these core utilities. Are universities so competitive they won't share? So does that mean they all pay the same licensing fees to use the same private vendor offerings? I remember Zope / Plone and SchoolTool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SchoolTool Is there something even more comprehensive that's out there, suitable for college and university use? Does it come in modularized components? Is it an over-the-web database? Or do few if any universities really eat their own dog food? Like I say, I'm new to this business, just trying to get oriented. Kirby