Future of Informs and the Virtual Training Suite

Intute staff have posted about the future of Informs and the Virtual Training Suite. JISC funding for these services ends on 31 July 2011 and "no realistic alternative funding model for either service has been identified." "Therefore, in consultation with the Informs Advisory Group and JISC, the following ways forward have been agreed. We will investigate releasing Informs as open source software so that it can be installed and run locally in your own institutions. This work is in its early stages, but we will provide more information throughout the next few months, and full documentation will be made available to make the transition as easy as possible. We will keep Informs running at Mimas until December 2011 to allow users to move to the open source version or find other alternatives. Until this time all tutorials will work as normal, and helpdesk support will be available. The Virtual Training Suite site will be available until July 2012, but the tutorials will not be updated beyond July 2011. All Virtual Training Suite tutorials will be individually available to download and reuse from August 2011."
- Intute blog post explaining closure is here: http://www.intute.ac.uk/blog/2011/04/11/the-future-of-informs-and-the-virtual-training-suite/
- The report produced as a result of consultation, plus a memo on Informs as Open Source are at http://www.intute.ac.uk/announcements.html
- FAQ on Virtual Training Suite: http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/about/faqs.html
- FAQ on INFORMS: http://www.informs.intute.ac.uk/faqs.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: trees in Ambleside, April 2011

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