Many educational institutions are beginning to move more administrative and reference functions online, including both student and employee services. Although this has traditionally focused on back-end management applications, the new trend is to use portals and course management systems as the "last mile" that connects students and employees with the information they need. NextBrick provides integration services focused around two consortium-developed products, the open source portal platform uPortal, and the open source course management system Sakai. NextBrick is active in the JA-SIG community as well.

NextBrick's extensive experience with portal and content infrastructure as well as commitment to open standards and open source platforms can help offer educational institutions world-class collaborative features at a reasonable price. Portal and course management initiatives in particular can become extremely expensive using resources without knowledge of the special needs of universities. Because NextBrick is focused on the needs of university clients, you get the benefit of our experience at a reasonable cost.