Sun Microsystems has announced the launch of two social networking portals designed to connect the global education community. The new EduConnection.org community serves Sun's education sector customers, while Open Source University Meetup caters to students interested in open source programming tools and platforms.

Educonnection.org offers a platform for schools to exchange information and best practices that will help them to mitigate the challenges of purchasing and implementing new technology in an era of increasing budgetary pressure. It also provides an opportunity for Sun to directly energize, engage and support the education community.

Open source technologies are a cost-effective solution for many educational institutions today: 51 percent of schools in a recent EDUCAUSE survey already use them. As the leading contributor of open source technologies, Sun has expertise in building developer communities to foster technology innovations. EduConnection.org builds on that developer community foundation and focuses on solving technology issues.

Sun's OSUM is an open social network created for students interested in learning, sharing and using open source developer tools and platforms. The portal harnesses the true power of open source by helping students collaborate and use open source developer tools like MySQL, NetBeans, Java, GlassFish, OpenSPARC, OpenSolaris and more. Students can also use OSUM to connect in person through on-campus meetups and events coordinated by the network of more than 500 Sun Campus Ambassadors. Within the first two months of the launch, there are already 10,000 members in the OSUM community.

"Sun knows that communities drive innovation, especially among educators and researchers. To this end, we created Educonnection.org and OSUM to encourage conversations and information sharing among all of our stakeholders, from students to educators" said Joe Hartley, vice president, global education, government and healthcare, Sun Microsystems.