Unicon's New Academus Open Campus Offers Easy Startup Options for Sakai's Collaboration and Learning Environment; Site Offers Access to Test Drives, Pilot Projects, Custom Hosted Solutions & Full-Scale Implementations

PHOENIX--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 31, 2006--Unicon Inc., the leading independent provider of enterprise portal, collaboration, learning, and integration technology for higher education institutions, today announced its new Academus Open Campus (AOC) Portal featuring the latest in Sakai's Collaboration and Learning Environment technologies. The new site is designed to provide academic administrators, faculty, and IT personnel with a variety of low-cost and low-risk options for quickly evaluating and deploying the latest open source technologies from Sakai and other vendors. The new site is located at www.academusopencampus.com.

"Higher Ed has the daunting challenge of choosing the right technologies to increase the capacity of their online services while maintaining finite resources," stated John C. Blakely, CEO of Unicon Inc. "Our Academus Open Campus makes those choices easier by providing a variety of scalable options for testing and implementing the latest open-community online learning management solutions."

Academus Open Campus: Is education's most comprehensive portal for testing and evaluating open source technologies from Sakai, uPortal, and other vendors. AOC also provides an excellent hosted environment for institutions wanting the benefits of lowered costs for hardware, software, and IT support. AOC's highlighted areas include:

Sakai Test Drive

The "Sakai Test Drive" program is designed to provide educational instructors and IT personnel with a risk-free, zero-cost program to evaluate Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment without incurring licensing fees, development/maintenance time and resources, or hardware purchases.

Pilot Sakai Project

The innovative and affordable Pilot Sakai program allows colleges and universities to easily develop, run, and evaluate a fully functional Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment for its students on a per quarter or semester basis. A 20-student environment (www.pilotsakai.com) can be operational in one business day for the total price of $185 for a six-month program.

Elluminate Virtual Classroom

Elluminate Live!(R) Lite Office(TM) is included in the Academus Open Campus offering, providing a single-room, personal-sized virtual classroom with whiteboard, two-way audio, text messaging, and participant information modules. More info at: www.elluminate.com.

About Sakai

The Sakai software is a community source effort to develop a platform for innovation in collaboration, teaching and learning, and research support software. The Sakai Project's primary goal is to deliver the Sakai application framework and associated course management software (CMS) tools and components that are designed to work together. These components are for course development, delivery, management, and, as an augmentation of the original CMS model, they also support classroom and research collaboration. The software is being designed to be competitive with the best CMSs available. For more information visit www.sakaiproject.org.

About Unicon

Unicon is a provider of enterprise portal, collaboration, learning, and integration technology for higher education institutions and is the leading commercial supporter of the uPortal open source Web portal initiative. Unicon solutions are based on open source and community source technologies to increase productivity while reducing costs. The company is the developer of the Academus Enterprise Portal and Web Content Management Solution and creator of the Academus Open Campus Web site www.academusopencampus.com, which allows academic instructors and IT personnel to try new online technologies, products, and services in a low-cost and risk-free environment. Unicon is also a Sakai Commercial Affiliate. More information about Unicon Inc. is available at http://www.unicon.net/.