One of the things that first attract­ed me to the whole idea of SIF (the Sys­tems Inter­op­er­abil­i­ty Frame­work) was the idea that it could enable edu­ca­tion­al appli­ca­tions to become more inde­pen­dent from those appli­ca­tions that fed it infor­ma­tion and from those that depend­ed on it for infor­ma­tion. A sup­pli­er that makes an appli­ca­tion that spe­cial­izes in trans­porta­tion man­age­ment can start to focus more atten­tion on trans­port­ing chil­dren to and from school and less on the how data comes from this sys­tem vs. that sys­tem if the data always looks the same. In the end we all get bet­ter trans­porta­tion sys­tems. This is because the data has become portable.

Anoth­er con­cept that has been inter­est­ing has been the idea of a soft­ware plug-in. This web site frame­work that I am using to present this (Word­Press) uses plug-ins to present a cloud of tags (to your right), a mech­a­nism for leav­ing com­ments, a reg­is­tra­tion sys­tem and many more. Many video games have a base sta­tion that allow you to plug in or load sev­er­al games allow­ing it to load new func­tion­al­i­ty that wasn't avail­able when the base unit was first devel­oped.

How could this relate to SIF?

When we set out to solve the prob­lem of cre­at­ing a SIF adapter frame­work, we took a dif­fer­ent approach than oth­ers who set out to solve the same prob­lem. Instead of devel­op­ing a toolk­it for pro­gram­mers, we set out using a dif­fer­ent approach with a dif­fer­ent audi­ence in mind: those with­out a pro­gram­ming back­ground. Ques­tions arose: Could we build an adapt­able SIF agent that:

1. …would be able to SIF-enable any exist­ing appli­ca­tion?
2. …would require no or very min­i­mal changes to the tar­get appli­ca­tion?
3. …would require no pro­gram­ming?
4. …could be con­fig­ured through a web inter­face?

Our Audience

As we spoke to peo­ple at dis­tricts, we found that most felt com­fort­able with being able to cre­ate SQL queries using some sort of tool such as SQL Serv­er Man­age­ment Stu­dio, Access or MySQL Query Brows­er, so that's where we aimed. What we devel­oped was ZIA­gent™.

Inter­est­ing­ly enough, our ini­tial objec­tive was to cre­ate a tool for users in school dis­tricts, local author­i­ties and oth­er edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions that would allow them to cre­ate SIF agents for the host of lega­cy (bespoke) appli­ca­tions that might have been cre­at­ed through the years. This objec­tive was met through our cur­rent prod­uct, but we were pleas­ant­ly sur­prised when OEM sup­pli­ers approached us ask­ing if it could also be used to SIF-enable their off-the-shelf appli­ca­tions. Of course, we were hap­py to oblige and ZIA­gent has been used to SIF-enable many SIF-cer­ti­fied appli­ca­tions.

ZIAgent™

ZIA­gent uses a wiz­ard-like inter­face to con­fig­ure its out­bound side (pro­vid­ing and respond­ing to requests) and a busi­ness rules approach to con­fig­ure its inbound side (sub­scribe and receiv­ing respons­es). You can read more about it if you would like at ZIA­gent. The rest of this arti­cle deals with only one of its fea­tures: Import/Export.

When an agent has been con­fig­ured, the user may choose to export its con­fig­u­ra­tion through the ZIA­gent dash­board. The export screen looks some­thing like this:

When ZIA­gent exports the con­fig­u­ra­tion, it cre­ates an XML file with the con­fig­u­ra­tion for the items that were checked off. This con­fig­u­ra­tion can then be used to:

• Load into a copy of ZIA­gent Run­time Edi­tion
• Pass to some­one else who has a ZIA­gent Design­er license and sim­i­lar needs — it can be import­ed and used as the basis for a sim­i­lar agent
• Upgrade the agent. When we come out with a new ver­sion of the agent, the upgrade process is typ­i­cal­ly to export the con­fig­u­ra­tion from the pre­vi­ous ver­sion and then import it into the new ver­sion. Occa­sion­al­ly, if code val­ues have been changed in the SIF ver­sion, they will need to be re-dis­cov­ered and re-mapped to new val­ues after import­ing.

The Exported File

The export­ed file con­tains a com­plete descrip­tion of the agent, includ­ing event rules, object rules, regres­sion test­ing rules, code val­ues, and trans­la­tion map­pings. It could even include infor­ma­tion about the serv­er it was installed on and the audits from that machine if those options were cho­sen from the menu when the file was cre­at­ed. This is what the XML file looks like:

SIF Agent Libraries

Now as time goes on, we are faced with the issue of the sale, dis­tri­b­u­tion and sup­port of an ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion of SIF agents plug-in con­fig­u­ra­tions and how to man­age them. Some belong to our OEM cus­tomers — those ZIA­gent cus­tomers own the rights to the agent con­fig­u­ra­tions and dis­trib­ute the SIF agent pack­aged prod­uct with their prod­ucts. Some we devel­oped because we saw a need in the mar­ket­place but the agent end­ed up being for:

• …an appli­ca­tion that a school wouldn't typ­i­cal­ly pay for, such as Moo­dle (it would under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE)
• …a fea­ture that comes bun­dled with oth­er soft­ware, such as Active Direc­to­ry that is part of Microsoft® Win­dows Serv­er
• …add-ons that come free once you have oth­er soft­ware installed, such as Microsoft® Win­dows Share­Point® Ser­vices that is a free down­load once you have Win­dows Serv­er installed

The Moodle SIF Agent

Present­ly, the Moo­dle SIF agent is a sub­scrib­ing agent con­fig­ured for the UK 1.1 spec­i­fi­ca­tion. It sub­scribes to:

• Iden­ti­ty
• LAIn­fo
• SchoolIn­fo
• Work­for­cePer­son­al
• Learn­er­Per­son­al
• Learn­er­SchoolEn­rol­ment
• Learn­er­GroupEn­rol­ment

When the Moo­dle SIF agent learns that a new learn­er is now attend­ing a school (when it receives an Iden­ti­ty SIF object for him or her), it cre­ates a Moo­dle account that aligns with the account that the Iden­ti­ty Man­age­ment sys­tem has already cre­at­ed. The only inter­est­ing thing it learns from that object is the iden­ti­ty and the SIF RefId (or GUID). The rest of the infor­ma­tion about the learn­er was received ear­li­er in objects such as Learn­er­Per­son­al and Learn­er­SchoolEn­rol­ment. The SIF RefId in the Iden­ti­ty object will match the RefIds in those objects, allow­ing the agent to get a com­plete pic­ture of the learn­er and cre­ate a com­plete Moo­dle User Record for him or her.

The Moo­dle SIF agent can also enroll these learn­ers in Moo­dle cours­es for one of sev­er­al rea­sons:

• A map­ping can be set up between a course (a School Group Type) in a school and a Moo­dle course. For exam­ple, a rule can be set up that tells the SIF agent "all learn­ers that are enrolled in Biol­o­gy I should auto­mat­i­cal­ly be enrolled in the Moo­dle course named Biol­o­gy ABCD"
• A map­ping can be set up between a sec­tion of a course (a School Group) and a Moo­dle course. For exam­ple, a rule can be set up that tells the SIF agent "all learn­ers that are enrolled in Mr. Wilde's 5^th peri­od Eng­lish class that meets in room B‑101 should auto­mat­i­cal­ly be enrolled into the Moo­dle course named Shake­speare for Begin­ners.
• A map­ping can be added that maps any char­ac­ter­is­tic in a SIF object to enroll­ment in a Moo­dle course. For exam­ple, if a learner's Eng­lish­Pro­fi­cien­cy infor­ma­tion indi­cates that he or she falls at a cer­tain lev­el, the SIF agent could enroll that learn­er in an "Eng­lish as a Sec­ond Lan­guage" course.

The Moo­dle agent does not pub­lish infor­ma­tion, how­ev­er. The main chal­lenge was that Moo­dle is very flex­i­ble in how it allows teach­ers to cre­ate tests and store results. So much, that there is no one com­mon way that tests are giv­en and test results are stored in a Moo­dle data­base, so it was dif­fi­cult for us to make a gener­ic way to set up the SIF agent to pub­lish them. Where we would like to go with this is to get the SIF agent used in sub­scribe mode in a num­ber of places and then seek user com­mu­ni­ty input on pro­vid­ing.

The Active Directory Agent — Ipseity™

Visu­al Soft­ware has had an Active Direc­to­ry SIF agent for sev­er­al years and it has been installed in many places with good suc­cess. The Ipse­ity SIF agent has sev­er­al inter­est­ing, use­ful and unique fea­tures:

• When a learn­er enrolls, it cre­ates an account in the OU appro­pri­ate for a learn­er attend­ing his or her school
• A home direc­to­ry is cre­at­ed and if a home direc­to­ry "tem­plate" tree was estab­lished for this type of learn­er, the files from that tem­plate are copied into the learner's home direc­to­ry and the file per­mis­sions are mod­i­fied so that the learn­er will have the prop­er access to them
• The learn­er is added to the appro­pri­ate groups depend­ing on the school in which he or she is enrolled
• Each learn­er may also have a "learn­er per­son­al AD GROUP" cre­at­ed**
• When the learn­er is enrolled into a sec­tion of a course (school group), he or she may be added to an AD group for that sec­tion (school group)

The ZIAD SIF agent is made up of two pieces: the SIF agent and an AD web ser­vice. The AD web ser­vice is installed with spe­cial priv­i­leges wher­ev­er the domain con­troller is and the SIF agent is installed in a place that is reach­able by the Zone Inte­gra­tion Serv­er. If nec­es­sary, the com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the two is done using HTTPS, but using this tech­nique allows the SIF agent to eas­i­ly switch between han­dling sep­a­rate AD forests at schools or a sin­gle, com­bined AD for­est, sim­ply by mak­ing a minor mod­i­fi­ca­tion to its rules.

Although the above fea­tures described fea­tures for learn­ers, ZIAD also man­ages accounts for teach­ers and con­tacts (par­ents).

The SharePoint Agent — ZIPortal™

The Share­Point SIF agent works with Win­dows Share­Point Ser­vices, the free add-on por­tal pack­age that comes with Microsoft Win­dows Serv­er. The ini­tial moti­va­tion behind cre­at­ing this agent was to be able to replace learner's home direc­to­ries, giv­ing them per­son­al web sites instead. As it matured and peo­ple began to under­stand how it worked and how sim­ple it was to con­fig­ure, oth­er ideas devel­oped. For exam­ple, you can have sites for:

• Learn­ers, where they cre­ate per­son­al work such as reports, pre­sen­ta­tions and elec­tron­ic art­work. This site is cre­at­ed either at the begin­ning of the school year or when the learn­er enters the school. Hav­ing this site, for the most part, reduces or elim­i­nates the need for a home direc­to­ry. Files are stored in doc­u­ment libraries in the site. One (very large) place to back­up, one back­up file to man­age.
• Teach­ers, for their per­son­al infor­ma­tion and for the infor­ma­tion they share with oth­er teach­ers. This can con­tain every­thing from les­son plans to con­tact infor­ma­tion and links to each of the learn­er pages for those assigned to class­es that this teacher teach­es.
• Sec­tions of cours­es (School Groups), that would con­tain cur­rent infor­ma­tion for the sub­ject or sub­jects being taught, includ­ing home­work assign­ments, a place to sub­mit work, and links that might help learn­ers. This site would be main­tained by the class­room teacher and would be linked to by each of the stu­dent sites as well as the teacher sites.
• Par­ents, as a place where they can find infor­ma­tion about their children's school work, what's hap­pen­ing at the school or how to help their chil­dren with their home­work. Each par­ent would have an indi­vid­ual site (two par­ents would not nor­mal­ly share a site) that would stay with that par­ent regard­less of how many chil­dren attend­ed in the dis­trict (LA, RBC) and the pri­va­cy require­ments need­ed even if par­ents got divorced and remar­ried would be enforced by hav­ing the site's per­mis­sions tied to Active Direc­to­ry Learn­er Per­son­al Groups (see above).
• Lern­er Port­fo­lios, that are cre­at­ed when a learn­er first enters the school (or dis­trict) and con­tin­ues to exist until the learn­er leaves. This site becomes a repos­i­to­ry for work col­lect­ed dur­ing those years (papers, pre­sen­ta­tions, etc.) and has fold­ers for each school year's work.

Sam­ple Learn­er Site

The agent itself works with Share­Point tem­plates. To make it work, the edu­ca­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion needs to cre­ate or adopt a set of tem­plates that fit the require­ments of the learn­er, teacher and par­ent audi­ences. The SIF agent's con­fig­u­ra­tion is then set to point to them and have them asso­ci­at­ed with the set of rules that will do things with them when cer­tain SIF events occur. Things that the SIF agent is capa­ble of doing includes:

• Cre­at­ing a new site from a tem­plate when the agent receives a new Learn­er, Teacher or Par­ent event is received, move the site to a new school if an Enroll­ment Change is received
• Adding an item to a list in a web part cor­re­spond­ing to an ele­ment in a SIF mes­sage that is received. A cer­tain amount of infor­ma­tion will also be required in the same mes­sage in order for the agent to be able to find that list. Alter­na­tive­ly, Delet­ing that list Item.
• Adding a web part to a page when a cer­tain SIF mes­sage is received. As with the pre­vi­ous, enough infor­ma­tion must be present in the received object to track down that page.

With these prim­i­tives and a flex­i­ble, pow­er­ful SIF rules engine, ZIPor­tal can eas­i­ly man­age hun­dreds of thou­sands of Share­Point sites and keep them syn­chro­nized with stu­dent, teacher and par­ent pop­u­la­tions that are man­aged in the Stu­dent Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems (Man­age­ment Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems).

SIF Agent Runtime + Plug-Ins + SIF Agent User Community

So now, hav­ing this unique design avail­able allows us to try some­thing new for SIF that oth­ers have been doing with video games, CD play­ers and oth­er types of soft­ware for years — turn the dis­tri­b­u­tion mod­el upside down.

Although it might not appear too sig­nif­i­cant at first, what this facil­i­ty allows us to do is to change the way we dis­trib­ute these SIF agents. As men­tioned ear­li­er, the XML file that was saved in the design­er can be giv­en to some­one who has a ZIA­gent Run­time Edi­tion. The Run­time Edi­tion looks very much like the Design­er Edi­tion except it is miss­ing some of the menu items that allow users to cre­ate new agents:

ZIA­gent Run­time Edi­tion (few­er menu items)

…but it does include options to import a con­fig­u­ra­tion cre­at­ed by some­one else, reset serv­er-relat­ed infor­ma­tion, enter local trans­la­tion infor­ma­tion and pro­vides full access to audit­ing trails — all the things you would need as a SIF agent user. As to dis­trib­ut­ing and sup­port­ing agents, we now have mul­ti­ple options:

• Dis­trib­ute the ZIA­gent Run­time paired with a spe­cif­ic con­fig­u­ra­tion as before, bun­dle it with sup­port and charge using one of any num­ber of meth­ods (per learn­er, per year or per serv­er, and so on…), or…
• License the ZIA­gent Run­time sep­a­rate­ly and cre­ate a type of license where the SIF agent con­fig­u­ra­tions that we make avail­able under this license would be freely avail­able to ZIA­gent Run­time licensee

• This pool of agents that will ini­tial­ly be includ­ed are the cur­rent Visu­al Soft­ware Moo­dle, Active Direc­to­ry and Share­Point SIF agents (UK edi­tions)
• ZIA­gent Run­time licens­es will be avail­able at a very low cost to schools and bulk licens­es will be made avail­able to Local Author­i­ties and Region­al Broad­band Con­sor­tia that will cov­er all schools in the LA or RBC
• Sup­port will be made avail­able as need­ed on an hourly basis (through Visu­al Soft­ware or though approved inte­gra­tion part­ners) or through a com­mu­ni­ty web site that will be added as a branch of this web site
• The agents can be mod­i­fied in their XML form (we will post doc­u­men­ta­tion) or by orga­ni­za­tions who license the ZIA­gent Design­er (The design­er will give then all the web-based tools to con­fig­ure agents). Those orga­ni­za­tions with the ZIA­gent design­er will be able to cre­ate and "donate" SIF agents into the pool of SIF agents, but only those who have licensed ZIA­gent Run­time licens­es will be able to get to the part of the web site where the library of SIF agents will be stored.

We've been offer­ing the full ser­vice option described as the first alter­na­tive for years. We will con­tin­ue to do so for those who pre­fer every­thing includ­ed in a sin­gle price — prod­uct and ser­vice.