What's New in SIF 2?

The SIF 2 Implementation Specification has been available for about a year. Quite honestly, general adoption of SIF 2 has lagged in the market due to various reasons that I won't go into at this time. SIF 1.5r1 is still the most widely implemented version of the specification. It's worth noting that SIF 2 offers some compelling new capabilities. Following is a summary of some of the new capabilities in SIF 2 (this information comes from the specification and from my own experience):

• Increased use of other standards, including XML schema and namespaces
  
• Addition of SIF_Extended query to support more dynamic query and reporting
  
• Many new data objects across the specification
  
• Student Record Exchange objects provide new capabilities for data exchange between K12 and higher education, and for many other applications
• Significant enhancements to assessment objects
• Various infrastructure improvements to provide for "smarter" agents
• Implementation of contexts as a way to sub-divide zones
• Implementation of metadata; this will become increasingly more important as SIF gains momentum in teaching and learning technologies
  
• For developers with existing "responder" agents it is also important to note that SIF 2 now requires that you support querying by all mandatory elements, not just the root elements
  

Should you wait for SIF 2?
Emphatically: NO! You should not wait for wider adoption of SIF 2 prior to implementing.
If you are a school looking to implement then it's likely that most of your applications support 1.5r1 today, and that the vendor companies should have a roadmap to SIF 2. Going forward today will allow you to get the benefits that SIF offers, and it will allow you to gain experience that you can apply to SIF 2 implementations when the time is right. Just make sure that your ZIS will support SIF 2!
If you are a software vendor looking to implement a SIF agent the answer on waiting is also "no, don't wait." However, you should plan on implementing support for both 1.5r1 and 2 within your agent. Depending on how you implement the Agent, the level of effort to do "double duty" is definitely not double; however, it's also not necessarily trivial.
Another item of note is that SIFA is striving to release specifications more rapidly to better accommodate end user needs. As of the time of this post, SIF 2.1 is the current release, 2.2 is in review, and work is being done on SIF 2.3+. Rest assured that the development process that SIFA follows ensures backward compatibility within the 2.x series.
Please make sure to visit the specification site if you are interested in all of the details.