Facilitator: Molly Langstaff, University of Iowa

Goal: Understand institution/system needs and the Desire2Learn company direction. Lay out plan of action for fulfilling needs.

Agenda:
1. Introductions (10 minutes)

2. Round robin of statements of need from institutions/systems. (7 minutes each)

3. Desire2Learn Company statement of direction. (10 minutes)

4. Identify matches of need and direction. (15 minutes)

5. Identify and document gaps. (30 minutes)

6. Outline and agree on an action plan to eliminate or reduce gaps. (20 minutes)

Here are the list of questions that I send to them (you can expand the list as you see fit or if you want to drill down further)

Hi All,

Below is the list of questions that I will be bringing to the meeting.

- Jim

Questions regarding Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services – Jim Phelps, Sr. I.T. Architect, DoIT, UW-Madison

Background Information:

Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services specifically have been endorsed as the desired interoperability architecture by the CIO Council (CIO’s from all of the UW campuses and the UW-System), Common Systems Review Group (CIOs and Business Officers from various UW Campuses and UW System who oversee the shared applications and infrastructure), Common Systems Interoperability Architecture Working Group (CSIAWG), Information Technology Managers Council (ITMC), UW-Madison CIO and others through-out the UW-System. Any integration that does not follow the SOA/Web Services design principles creates a technical deficit and prevents the UW System and campuses from moving forward in their strategic direction.

There is a business need for D2L to integrate with the UW-System infrastructure as well as the infrastructure of each UW campus. This will require many integration points that will have to expose the data and complex business processes.

Example Questions for Lawson:

(1) Where is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services on D2L’s Roadmap?

(2) Does D2L currently provide standardized Web Service interfaces for their business functions?
– If not, when will they?

(3) Does D2L expose their data in industry standard XML formats such as the schemas defined by eduPerson for person role information and IMS for course information? IMS, SCORM and IEEE standards, both generally, and this area.

- If not, when will they?
- What schema documentation exists for these interfaces?
- What process does D2L follow if they need to extend an industry standard schema?
- How do they document those extensions?

(4) Does D2L have WSDL (Web Service Description Language) documents for all of their exposed Web Service interfaces?

- If so, where are these WSDLs published?
- What is the process for modifying the WSDLs?
- What are D2L’s best-practices around maintenance, development, publishing and changing of WSDLs and Web Services interfaces?

(5) Are D2L’s Web Service Interfaces exposed in a way to discoverable and interoperable with UDDI version 1, 2 and 3 (OASIS, Ratified Feb 2005) registries ?

- What about BPEL?

(6) Is D2L composed of reusable business process components?

- If so, are these components exposed as Web Services?
- Are they consumable and reusable via BPEL, Web Services Registries and Enterprise Service Bus technologies?
- Does D2L use BPEL, WS-Choreography or another open architecture to build their applications from these reusable business process components? If so, which?

(7) What methods of Message Oriented Middleware are in place within D2L?

- Are these methods exposed to the outside world for messaging integration points?
- Are these methods and points documented and supported as integration functions?

(8) In which standards bodies does actively D2L participate?

- Which standards does D2L see as critical to their integration and interoperability plans?
- Which standards have they submitted?
- What other vendors is D2L working with to develop industry standards?
- Does D2L work closely with the standards bodies such that the standards represent D2L’s needs?

(9) How and where does D2L represent and enforce their WS Policy?

- Does a change in policy (e.g. Security, Quality of Service, Routing, Mediation) require changing of core-code, reconfiguration and redeployment or can the changes be made on the fly?
- Does Lawson use intermediary Policy Enforcment Points (e.g. Policy Enforcement Points that are outside of the actual Web Service interface that are invoked as a proxy or a filter)?

(10) Does D2L expose the business functions (services) as WSRP portletts?

- What about JSR168 portletts?

###Comments from Dirk###
Ah, I see, this is a generic list of technical capabilities.
Nothing specific to APBS, other than the reference to HR-XML.

Specifically, we should be asking D2L to support the IMS, SCORM and IEEE standards,
both generally, and this area.

The one area this most obviously applies to is SIS data.
The IMS Enterprise Services (ES) is what we’d like the SIS and LMS to support.
Would you add this to your list of questions for PS?
Note that MILER basically to the out-of-the-box PS SQR that emits IMS Enterprise
and modified it for their DEPS data feed. It would be nice to see
PS make an IMS ES version.

The 2nd place this could apply to is the Tools Interoperability specification,
which is WS based. That’s a work-in-progress, of course.

–Dirk

Dan McDevitt’s presentation on Indiana University’s Electronic Document (Workflow) engine that routes documents for HR. The engine is integrated with PeopleSoft’s HR suite.

Buy Build Borrow (Open Source) as choices. Buy and Customize seen as worst of both worlds (cost plus maintenance problems).

Workflow – does their system support differing workflows on campus or department level?

#### Why they did their customization:

1. P.S. 8.0 didn’t support “Pending” status for documents still in the workflow.
1. Delivering the P.S. “native” screens to 1200 users was too difficult. Issues with robustness, data integrity.

They have 22 different forms that they route in their workflow

#### Enterprise Workflow Engine:

- True workflow – routing e-docs from initiation to completion.
- What about role information?
- Supports digital signatures
- 1200 users with 3 levels of workflow routing:
– Fiscal Approver and Personnel Approver
– Level 1: Required Approvals
– Level 2: Discretionary Approvals based on the Org Chart Hierarchy
– Level 3: Campus Level “final” approval

- After level 3, data transferred into PeopleSoft

Electronic Document bridges multiple PeopleSoft components. Before, one paper document would cover all areas. Wanted to replicate that functionality.

Interfaces are based on direct database reads. Had problems using the PeopleSoft Component Interfaces.

#### Demo:

Interesting, the demo is flashed based. The cursor moves and things type automagically.
All information is handled inside of the workflow engine up until the final click. The data is then inserted into the PeopleSoft screens. The user clicks on “Save” in PeopleSoft and all of the PS business logic is applied.

#### Issues:

Subject and Document locking.

- Subject Locking is employee based locking. Once a document has been initiated for an employee, no other documents can be initiated for that employee.
- Document locking – straight for contention issues.

Open validation

- Checks document against the official PeopleSoft data each time the document is opened.
– Start an electronic document
– someone goes in a changes the PeopleSoft data for the person
– the form is marked as denied when opened the next time

Issues with PeopleSoft Component Interface

- Component Interfaces didn’t work with complex interactions (those with multiple tabs and/or multiple scroll areas).

Other issues:

- support and training
- different needs of power-users vs. novice users
- Disapprovals used as a training mechanism rather than Corrections
- Pairing electronic documents with supporting document
– use special envelopes
– print a routing sheet from electronic document

Future Enhancements

- Multiple employees on one document (pay change for all student workers)
- Improve usability – things like side-by-side view (old pay rate beside new pay rate)
- reporting (how long did it take, who is sitting on documents)

#### Usage Stats

11,000 per month on average
It takes about 3.5 days on average from initiation to approval
Average document has 3 routing stops

#### My Questions:

1. Workflow – does their system support differing workflows on campus or department level?
1. Where does their Role information live? How is it managed?

#### Other Questions

Tom Scott – Moving to PS 8.9 Student will mean moving to PS 8.9 HR. This will change the component interfaces.
- There will be lots of impact on our customizations. Will look at new Component Interfaces.

Jack – what did it cost you? About $11 Million for the total HR system. Could have done it cheaper but they had lots of starts-and-stops. Started with PeopleSoft 7.5.

Elizabeth Conklin – Why build workflow instead of buy one? Not positive (Barry Walsh at IU for Workflow).

Tell us more about the [Kuali project](http://kuali.org/) . In the development stage.

Why did you build your own time keeping system? That is a good one. Cost at the time. Some experience with Kronos. Very experience.

Is there a lot of maintenance on the Workflow rules themselves? The rules are fairly stagnant. Difficult to establish the early rules and routing paths.

The majority of the roles are maintained within the workflow engine. Roles for required approvals is determined from the HR Financial System department table. (Level 1 read from department table. All the rest are embedded within the workflow engine). There is a delegation function. Can delegate to a work group.

Is there a segregation of functions in financial data? You have to have a funding line filled out when you fill out the form.

Workflow can vary by department.

They encumber for salaries. They use the PS encumbrance process.

What are the Authentication requirements / system used for your digital signature? Token authentication along with Password. SAFEWORD – token authentication. 2000 tokens in use (Mark Bruin led the Token project).

Do you see an impact of PeopleSoft / Oracle migration to Web Services and SOA on your system? Make it easier / harder? Hopefully make their life easier.

System is developed in J2EE over an Oracle Database.

Which came first – Electronic Document System or PeopleSoft? Did you pick PeopleSoft and then go whoops doesn’t do the electronic PAF form? HR office wanted to have an electronic PAF.

How are doing the dump into PeopleSoft? One critical factor is the Single Sign-On between workflow and PeopleSoft. What you see when you save from the Workflow is what you would see if you went into PeopleSoft self service. They added their own IU tab.

Lots of questions about their business processes (are positions numbers tied to departments or to funding line etc …) and funding for positions data models.