CAS Consulting Services
In which I congratulate the volunteers on the CAS project email lists for the many quality answers to questions about CAS in that forum and echo Scott Battaglia's remarks on the availability of more urgent assistance.
Scott (lead developer on the CAS project) writes:
The CAS mailing list is a volunteer effort where people respond as best they can to things that interest them (or that they feel qualified to answer). Therefore, responses are not guaranteed in any timely matter (if at all). If you have specific needs and require guaranteed support (beyond best effort), the CAS project maintains a list of commercial entities who are happy to provide guaranteed support and consulting services:
http://www.ja-sig.org/products/cas/community/support/index.html
We do not actively encourage or discourage people from using the commercial support provided by these companies (nor do we endorse any). We merely list them as a service to our users who require guaranteed support that may extend beyond the volunteer efforts provided by those who watch the mailing list.
I want to thank Scott and others for their over and beyond volunteer efforts answering questions and providing advice on how to effectively employ CAS. Those email list archives are a treasure trove.
While the CAS project itself doesn't endorse any particular consulting service provider, I do! I'm very pleased to see Unicon take to market more generally some of the CAS consulting services we've been providing more quietly for some time. Unicon has years of experience servicing another JA-SIG project (uPortal) and is the only JA-SIG Commercial Affiliate to also be featured among firms offering commercial services on the CAS platform.
The existing resources helping adopters to understand and make use of CAS are wide and deep, with years of quality discussions stored in those email list archives. A legitimate and worthwhile way to use a consulting firm like Unicon is to help you to derive value from these resources, and to in turn participate effectively in the community source process, improving the available documentation, extensions, and conference presence of CAS.
Your Blogmaster:
Andrew Petro
After graduating with a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University in 2004, Andrew stayed on to serve his alma mater as a casual systems programmer with the Technology & Planning group. His interests include automated software testing, application frameworks, and electronic security. Projects in which Andrew has been involved include the Central Authentication Service, YaleInfo Portal (Yale's uPortal implementation). and the Jasig uPortal project. Andrew currently serves on the Jasig CAS steering committee, has been the release engineer for uPortal, and has been published in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery on the topic of electronic voting. In spring 2006 Andrew joined Unicon full time, serving roles since then including technical lead and Cooperative Support developer.
