What makes the higher education and research communities distinctive in their need for middleware?
Many companies and other communities of interest are coming to understand the importance of middleware to their missions, and are proceeding with development. Higher education faces unique technical and policy issues in its deployment. Technical issues include the mobility of students, the diversity of equipment, and the requirements of advanced applications. Policy issues include ownership of data, FERPA and other public records issues, and extended collaborative relationships. Together these considerations make middleware deployment within higher education significantly harder than deployment outside of it.
