Pyle Center 9:30 AM to 11:30 AM, Room 217

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