The Goal
The aim of this work is to revise the IMS Enterprise Services v1.0 specification. The primary objectives are to:
- Extend the set of service behaviors to reflect the current operational mechanisms in Enterprise systems;
- Define new services to reflect the current operational mechanisms in Enterprise systems;
- Upgrade the Enterprise Services to fully support the IMS General Web Services v1.0 specification;
- Enhance the data model to support features that are currently supported using the extension features.
The current work activity is completing the CM/DN Draft specification with project group participants beginning to implement the specification.
Participants
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The Current Situation
The Enterprise Services v1.0 specification was published in July 2004. This specification introduced a Person, Group and Membership service wrapper for the Enterprise v1.1 data model (this data model was released in July 2002). Since the release of that work there has been significant increase in the understanding and integration needs for a service-based approach to Enterprise systems. The work on this new version of the specification is geared towards amending the Enterprise Services specification to reflect these changes in deployment needs and approaches.
The Rationale
The extension of the Enterprise Services to more directly reflect the business processes for Enterprise Systems will have the following benefits:
- Systems integration will be easier due to the clear definition of a broader set of service interfaces;
- It will be easier to replace services as and when required. This will reduce the costs of migration ad will improve system reliability;
- The new set of service behaviors will provide a more coherent integration .
The Impact
- Student Information Systems (SIS) and LMS vendors will no longer need to produce different versions to support point to point integrations.
- Universities will no longer need to customize their SIS and LMS implementations to support integrations.
- A broader class of learning applications can be integrated at low cost to meet the needs of education institutions.
The Charter
The IMS Technical Advisory Board approved the Enterprise Services v2.0 Charter in February 2007. The work has since been renamed to Learning Information Services (LIS) to reflect its primary purpose. IMS GLC Community Members may download a copy of the
charter.
Further Information
For information on IMS GLC and the benefits of being a Contributing Member, please contact:
Rob Abel
Chief Executive Officer
IMS Global Learning Consortium
rabel@imsglobal.org
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