Student Record Exchange Pilot at Naperville CUSD 203

I am currently at the MIS Conference in San Francisco, CA. Today I participated in a presentation on a pilot project that we are working on with Naperville CUSD 203 in Illinois. The other partners in the pilot include SIFA and Docufide. My portion of the slide deck can be found here.

Example Intra-Zone and Extra-Zone Integration Architectures

One of the books I often recommend to people who are new to message based integration solutions is "Enterprise Integration Patterns" by Hohpe and Woolf. Visio stencils that contain shapes for the various patterns and pattern components can be downloaded from the book's website. The following diagram (click it to view a larger version) tries to do a few things...

First, it states SIF architecture in terms of Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP). The second thing it does is illustrate one possible way to implement extra-zone services using EIP concepts. The third thing it does is to begin calling out the business and use cases for intra-zone versus extra-zone services, which are duplicated in the text below.

Intra-Zone Business and Use cases
1. Applications wish to exchange data on a regular basis
2. Applications are contained within a single enterprise, or closely related enterprises
3. Guaranteed delivery is desired or required
4. Central administration of message flow is desired or required
5. A collection of applications wish to share the same data

Extra-Zone Business and Use cases
1. Applications wish to exchange data on an infrequent basis
2. Applications have minimal or no organizational ties
3. Guaranteed delivery is not required
4. Central administration is not required
5. Two applications needs to share specific data

Pennsylvania Schools Interested in SIF

I attended the PETE&C conference in Hershey, PA on Sunday and Monday. It was encouraging to see a good turnout from both small and large districts at the pre-conference sessions on SIF. We were invited to attend by the Pennsylvania Department of Education and graciously hosted by our friends at the Central Susquehanna Intermediate Unit (CSIU). The SIF Association and several other SIFA members were also present. Thanks to everyone who attended! Here is the link to the slides that I presented. They contain information about my involvement in SIFA, information about Integrity, and examples of integrations that we have done.