Integrating Lotus Learning Management System (LMS) with Lotus Bluehouse

With the advent of SaaS and IBM'e initiatives of offering Web Conferencing Service (Sametime Unyte), Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr as SaaS (in Lotus Bluehome [http://bluehouse.lotus.com], it opens up another avenue which was ignored.

IBM has another Lotus brand of product for Corporates/Universities/Colleges/Schools named Lotus Learning Management System (LMS) [http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/learning-management-system/]. This is really cool product which provides ability to the institutes set up their coursewares, conduct trainings and a lot about learning. I am very keen to see if LMS can be offered as SaaS within Lotus Bluehouse. The advantages (plenty) (ok, I will talk from the perspective of customers - IBM can think of revenues)

1. All the offering that SaaS model provides (QoS parameters including better security and responsibility lies to SaaS provider, but site administration can still be done by the customers.
2. LMS along with the collaboration tools, a great mix - do we need classrooms still :-) - Yes, classrooms are best place for the regular students to be in..but for distant learning courses (where many US varisities conducting off-shore classes from India, this could be vital)..Currently, many research scholars (or college students doing project work rely on public social networking tools such as Orkut, YouTube, MySpace and other Project Management or file storage tools, they can get benefits. They can conduct conferencing with their peers or guides. Teachers can setup blogs for various topics and we have collaborative learning and experiences.
3. Many people may not be good speakers (and hence politicans), but they may have great writing skills and providing these tools in a controlled environment is such an easy way to encourage them to speak out to concerned audiences and not going public this way.
4. VERY good tool in Indian context - why: In Europe and Americas, they already are technologically advanced and students are exposed to good and bad part of Internet. But in India, with these tools, we will encourage them to adopt to these (read Lotus Bluehouse + LMS) and we have still huge number of people, who don't know these tools exists in the world. Educational institutes are a great way to popularize these tools among the generation next - and we have people, who don't want to listen to this and want to think about immediate revenue and profit - which is good for the H1/H2 quantitative figures, but bad for the people who may benefit by using those - well they can still still use open source it they wish, but that is not controlled and no one is really responsible for those. But if they some how be able to adopt to Bluehouse, it is well controlled environment, and they can collaborate better and secured..

I hope for the best of the Indian people...