Overview

In the fall of 2001, Visu­al Soft­ware began its jour­ney to take its tech­nol­o­gy that "added ser­vices to exist­ing appli­ca­tions with­out requir­ing changes be made to those appli­ca­tions" and mod­i­fy them to work with an emerg­ing edu­ca­tion­al stan­dard called SIF, or the Schools Inter­op­er­abil­i­ty Frame­work. This new stan­dard had the promise, and in lat­er years, advan­tage of allow­ing edu­ca­tion­al appli­ca­tions from any com­pat­i­ble ven­dor to exchange infor­ma­tion with any oth­er com­pat­i­ble vendor.

In 2007, with the acqui­si­tion of our first larg­er cus­tomer (Lon­don, with 1.7 mil­lion stu­dents and 2,700 schools), we began a process to re-design all of our prod­ucts from the ground up to han­dle imple­men­ta­tions this large and larg­er where the infra­struc­ture is imple­ment­ed in a sin­gle loca­tion and is shared by all the endpoints.

Two Examples

For exam­ple, using the SIF ter­mi­nol­o­gy, when data is passed from one appli­ca­tion to anoth­er where many appli­ca­tions are involved, the data trans­mis­sion and secu­ri­ty is han­dled by a piece of soft­ware called by a bro­ker or "Zone Inte­gra­tion Serv­er (ZIS)". In the mod­el used in sev­er­al states, this piece of soft­ware is repli­cat­ed and main­tained at every district.

	Non-Visu­al Soft­ware State	Visu­al Soft­ware State
	In the pic­ture below, the orange sym­bols rep­re­sent the soft­ware that would need to be pur­chased and main­tained at each of the school dis­tricts. This includes a bro­ker and an agent (adapter) that would gath­er and trans­fer data from the local dis­trict to soft­ware resid­ing at the state. Each dis­trict main­tains this soft­ware in addi­tion to the Stu­dent Infor­ma­tion Sys­tem soft­ware already main­tained. Even though the SIF inter­na­tion­al stan­dard is used to trans­fer the data, it is required by this imple­men­ta­tion that soft­ware from a sin­gle ven­dor be pur­chased for all districts. When report­ing needs to be done or data needs to be col­lect­ed, some­one at the dis­trict needs to man­u­al­ly make sure that the bro­ker is run­ning and that the oth­er con­nec­tor soft­ware that is installed local­ly is con­nect­ed to the soft­ware run­ning at the state.	In the Visu­al Soft­ware mod­el, a sin­gle, host­ed bro­ker is shared by all dis­tricts in the state. If the dis­tricts want to use their zone for shar­ing data between appli­ca­tions, the SEA could enable the host­ed ZIS (bro­ker) to allow this. Hav­ing a sin­gle, shared bro­ker at the SEA: Elim­i­nates the need to pur­chase bro­ker soft­ware for each of the school districts Elim­i­nates the need for each of the dis­tricts to main­tain exper­tise local­ly on how to sup­port the local bro­ker software Elim­i­nates the need to have any SEA-pur­chased soft­ware installed at each district Typ­i­cal­ly costs a frac­tion of the dis­trib­uted mod­el, espe­cial­ly when total imple­men­ta­tion costs are considered Typ­i­cal­ly takes a frac­tion of the time to imple­ment, since the infra­struc­ture is imple­ment­ed in a sin­gle loca­tion instead of hundreds
Statewide High-Lev­el Architecture
Secu­ri­ty as defined by NIST: assur­ance levels	Imple­men­ta­tions using this con­fig­u­ra­tion typ­i­cal­ly meet NIST Lev­el 1 or 2 requirements.	Imple­men­ta­tions using this con­fig­u­ra­tion may use Lev­el 2 but we rec­om­mend using Lev­el 3 requirements.

State-Level Shared Components

At the SEA, we've seen sev­er­al needs that can be addressed effi­cient­ly using SIF, including:

• Basic data col­lec­tion and con­sol­i­da­tion of data from dis­trict Stu­dent Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems into an Oper­a­tional Data Store (ODS). This might include: 
  • SIF-enabled appli­ca­tions
  • Appli­ca­tions that can pro­duce CSV files
• Enhanced data col­lec­tion from mul­ti­ple appli­ca­tions at dis­tricts into an Enter­prise Data Store (EDS), including: 
  • HR Sys­tems (more com­plete staff information)
  • Spe­cial Edu­ca­tion Sys­tems (more com­plete infor­ma­tion than is stored in SIS)
• Iden­ti­ty (Direc­to­ry) Management
• Stu­dent ID cre­ation / Records Transfer

Visu­al Soft­ware has COTS (Com­mer­cial Off-The-Shelf) Appli­ca­tions that address a num­ber of these needs, plus the infra­struc­ture need­ed to sup­port them:

The Operational / Enterprise Data Store (ODS/EDS) — Veracity™

Verac­i­ty is an out-of-the box Enter­prise-class, SIF-based, appli­ca­tion that main­tains a con­sol­i­dat­ed repos­i­to­ry of the data it col­lects from school dis­trict appli­ca­tions in real-time, as well as pro­vid­ing the following:

1. the abil­i­ty to data qual­i­ty check the col­lect­ed data in real-time against poli­cies estab­lished by the SEA (guide­lines for collections);
2. the abil­i­ty to noti­fy dis­tricts where they are with respect to their readi­ness regard­ing the next col­lec­tion cycle in sum­ma­ry form;
3. a secure inter­face for dis­trict staff to access that lets them see, in detailed form, error details so that the issues can be resolved in source sys­tems, there­by elim­i­nat­ing them permanently;
4. option­al­ly, a foun­da­tion for a doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem where­by doc­u­ments (scanned images or any oth­er dig­i­tal files) can be attached to any record col­lect­ed and stored in the data store. Depend­ing on how it is set up, the doc­u­ment store itself can be at the SEA or at the district.

Because it has built-in data qual­i­ty check­ing rules, it can also be deployed as a "data qual­i­ty gate­way" — as a front end to oth­er sys­tems such as those that assign iden­ti­ty val­ues (Stu­dent IDs, Staff IDs, School IDs, etc.), those that pre­pare data for fed­er­al report­ing and oth­ers that need to be assured that the data has been ver­i­fied before it is passed to them.

Federal Reporting — Acuity™

When states pre­pare reports to be sent to the fed­er­al depart­ment of edu­ca­tion, the data typically:

• needs to go through a val­i­da­tion process to make sure it passed SEA-lev­el checks and is con­sis­tent between districts
• needs to be con­vert­ed to a for­mat con­sis­tent with the US Depart­ment-defined CEDS schema

To help in this process, we have devel­oped our Acu­ity™ prod­uct. Acu­ity works either with raw data from school dis­trict zones or from a post Verac­i­ty "data qual­i­ty gate­way" zone to receive input data in SIF for­mat and store it in a CEDS-like form (Why "CEDS-like"? — see Why does Acu­ity™ use a CEDS-Like Data­base)

If con­nect­ed to school dis­trict raw data, Acu­ity will com­bine SIF objects as need­ed (or split them) to cre­ate the equiv­a­lent CEDS objects, per­form any trans­la­tions of the data that is required and keep the CEDS repos­i­to­ry up to date in real-time as the data is received from the Stu­dent Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems at the districts.

If con­nect­ed to a Verac­i­ty "data qual­i­ty gate­way" clean zone, it will per­form the same activ­i­ties, but the data may be pre-syn­chro­nized (for exam­ple, all of the stu­dent demo­graph­ic data for a giv­en stu­dent may arrive at the same time even though it was not sent that way by the orig­i­nat­ing Stu­dent Infor­ma­tion Sys­tem — the rules in Verac­i­ty might have been writ­ten told hold off send­ing a student's enroll­ment infor­ma­tion if the cor­re­spond­ing stu­dent demo­graph­ic wasn't sent for some reason).

Available Acuity / CEDS Implementations

Although our prod­uct line is most­ly imple­ment­ed using Microsoft tech­nolo­gies, the CEDS data­base itself may be stored in the fol­low­ing formats:

• Microsoft SQL Serv­er (2008 R2, 2012 R2, 2014, 2016)
• Ora­cle 12c

Infrastructure Support

To con­nect every­thing togeth­er, Visu­al Soft­ware offers three products:

ZIServer

At the foun­da­tion of any SIF deploy­ment is a Zone Inte­gra­tion Serv­er (ZIS) (bro­ker). It is soft­ware, the invis­i­ble couri­er that reli­ably deliv­ers infor­ma­tion from one source to one or more des­ti­na­tions. Not blind­ly, but aware of the infor­ma­tion objects that are of inter­est to the var­i­ous appli­ca­tions, aware of what they’re priv­i­leged to send and receive, and aware of the secu­ri­ty require­ments of each application’s con­nec­tions. Trans­lat­ing this aware­ness into enforced poli­cies, it pro­vides secure and reli­able mes­sage bro­ker services.

More Information

ZIAgent™

ZIA­gent™ is a full-fea­tured, con­fig­urable SIF agent designed to work with exist­ing appli­ca­tions (in con­trast with an Agent Devel­op­ment Kit that requires that the agent be writ­ten). It is an alter­na­tive to the error-prone process of cus­tom-devel­op­ing an agent from scratch or by using an ADK because the agent itself has been devel­oped, test­ed, debugged, stream­lined and cer­ti­fied many times over. ZIA­gent can typ­i­cal­ly be ful­ly con­fig­ured and SIF-cer­ti­fied in a mat­ter of days with no pro­gram­ming and with few or no mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the host application.

More Information

Mimic™

Mim­ic is an appli­ca­tion that allows appli­ca­tions par­tic­i­pate in a SIF col­lab­o­ra­tive that were nev­er intend­ed for such pur­pos­es. Through repeat­ed­ly export­ing key infor­ma­tion through CSV (Com­ma-Sep­a­rat­ed Val­ues files), the appli­ca­tions can update its state in a sim­ple, uni­ver­sal for­mat and store them in a com­mon loca­tion. By com­par­ing what it sees on a peri­od­ic basis to what it saw the last time it inspect­ed the same type file from the same source, Mim­ic can deter­mine what records were added, updat­ed and delet­ed and pub­lish SIF events as if the appli­ca­tion had a real SIF agent. Last­ly, it can respond to queries from the oth­er sub­scrib­ing mem­bers of the zone when they made requests for data with­out need­ing to con­tact the orig­i­nal application.

Implementation

All of our appli­ca­tions are avail­able as high­ly con­fig­urable com­mer­cial off-the-shelf (COTS) soft­ware. This means that the state can choose imple­men­ta­tion mod­els rang­ing from min­i­mal sup­port where their inter­nal IT staff per­forms most of the work (after being trained by Visu­al Soft­ware staff) to one where Visu­al Soft­ware staff can pro­vide assis­tance dur­ing the entire process.

For pri­va­cy rea­sons, we typ­i­cal­ly encour­age states to host the stu­dent data in their data cen­ters. To aid in this effort, we offer num­ber of means to help them make this as cost effec­tive and pain­less as pos­si­ble, includ­ing enter­prise automa­tion facil­i­ties opti­mized for the unique char­ac­ter­is­tics of these applications.

If you would like more infor­ma­tion, please feel free to con­tact us at <AskMe @ VisualSI.com> or give us a call dur­ing US East Coast busi­ness hours at +1 (215) 968‑3000.