STEP-C Students Tracking and Engagement Proof of concept

STEP-C Students Tracking and Engagement Proof of concept Rajesh Sinha (CEO, Fulcrum)

Agenda STEP-C Objective HE vision Implementing STEP-C (SOA + ESB) Future – ESB in Cloud Enterprise Architecture Q&A

STEP- C Objective UK Higher Education has been facing challenges since last few years. A few amongst them are: • UK HE organizations have adopted “best of breed” approach for acquiring information related to student. Each institution then has to integrate the various application systems and develop over-arching management reporting systems. • There was a need for information to be acquired and integrated across multiple Institutions to satisfy legislative needs. • UK legislation (anti-terrorism rules) require all UK Universities to be able to monitor whether students who have obtained a visa to attend an educational course are actually attending and studying.

HE Vision Students Record Portal Services Customers, Partners & vendors Cloud Computing Other App Enterprise Service Bus VLE Email Exchange Finance APP Library System Data Enrichment Using Data Quality Services EDW

Traditional Vs. SOA Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Students Track • Students Record • Personal Info Finance • Identity Check • Process Payment VLE • VLE plan • Course Attended • Monolithic application development • Point-to-point integration • Hard-wired • Resource Intensive • High bandwidth utilization • High number of Communication Channels Students Tracking • Students Record • Personal Info Finance • Identity Check • Process Payment VLE • VLE plan • Course Attended • Distributed applications • Backbone-based integration • Reusable services • Decoupling • Metadata driven – Services, Policy's and Bindings • Centralized Operation and Management

SOA- ESB De Montfort University Finance System DMU: Student Records Agresso QLX V 3. 9 Agresso QLS (V 4(1. 13)) Using Web Services ESB - ENTERPRISE SERVICE BUS DMU: Blackboard V 8. 0 (SP 5) Virtual Learning Environment Google Mail University Email [ ] Reporting System CREATE A REPOSITORY OF ACTIVITY / ENGAGEMENT DATA

SOA-ESB Southampton Solent University Library System SSU: Exlibris: Aleph Student Records Campus IT: Quercus Plus ESB - ENTERPRISE SERVICE BUS SSU: Open Source Moodle Virtual Learning Environment Reporting System [ ]

SOA-ESB - Comparison Finance System DMU: Student Records Agresso QLX V 3. 9 Agresso QLS (V 4(1. 13)) Library System SSU: Blackboard V 8. 0 (SP 5) Virtual Learning Environment Google Mail University Email DMU Campus IT: Quercus Plus IBM WEBSPHERE ESB MICROSOFT BIZTALK DMU: Exlibris: Aleph Student Records Reporting System Open Source Moodle Virtual Learning Environment Reporting System SSU

STEP-C Reporting From Agresso Students DMU Report From Blackboard From Gmail From Agresso -Finance From Aleph SSU Report From Quercus From Moodle

Implementation Benefits • The solution is deemed to be technology and platform independent • The total solution is a loosely coupled architecture that any systems can be added to the existing frame work without disturbing the current environment. • The reusability concepts of the SOA based architectures are implemented by consuming all the functionalities as services through the ESB. • The development time to add new systems is very less as retesting the existing solution and recompilation of the total solution for minor changes can be avoided. • With the concepts of Itineraries the data flow can be defined by a business analyst without knowing the underlying implementation of the any tool.

ESB in Cloud Internet Service Bus XML XML Subscribe Publish - Services re-used across various HEIs - Common services L M X HEI 1 L M X HEI 2 - Interoperability & Standardization - Involvement of Vendors, Suppliers & System Integrators Publish - Common Data Structures - Data Security -Data Management & Governance - Reporting & BI W ED HE

Today’s IT Environment § Inflexible, expensive to change systems § Not easily scalable § Tightly coupled systems § Data with frequent inconsistencies

‘To Be’ Enterprise Architecture SECURITY Services and Procedure LIFECYCLE Management Co. E Service Management Security policies Authentication Security management Process Policies Compliance TAC Security standards Authorization Confidentiality Standards SCM Quality control DGC Consumer Channels Browser Channel Service Consumer Process Tier Process modeling Application Tier SOA Apps Process automation Process monitoring Process analysis & control Composite Apps Business Intelligence BAM Productivity Apps Logging SSO and SSL enabled BRMS Rules engine Data Integration Enterprise Service Bus Service Provider Shared Services Reusable Components Communication Tier Asynchronous Data Tier Infrastructure Tier Framework Deployment services Publish/subscribe Synchronous APP 2 APP 1 Legacy Services Data quality ETL Notification & subscription Metadata MDM Campaign engine Portal and CMS Enterprise products Integration Tier SERVICE ORCHESTRATION Monitoring Auditing Printer/ Telephone Mail Mobility Service administration & management Queuing Reliable messaging Reporting Repository Others Firewall Mail Exchange Telephony N/w, SAN Servers and Desktop Virtualization Clustering & Load Bal Security Citrix FTP Green IT Grid Computing Scalability ENV provisioning IDS

STEP-C Background Each of the 167 UK HEIs have application architectures built with • Different combinations of ‘Best of Breed’ applications • Applications that are linked with point-to-point interfaces • Few “standards” for interfaces which are shared across the entire sector Hence, each University has a different starting point and also a different size of IT department

System Architecture using Microsoft ESB Value Added § § § § Agresso Students Record system Agresso Finance SQL Server 2005 Publish and Subscribe Architecture Message Transformation Adapter Framework Reusable Orchestration (Business Process Management) Itinerary Services Deployment Management Security ESB Toolkit Request Message Biz. Talk SQL adapter To Web service Response Message From Web service Aggregation of all the messages into a single message Biz. Talk Server ESB ramp On Ramp Off RAMP Biz. Talk SQL adapter Request & Response from Google API Biz. Talk SQL adapter Google API Black Board SQL Server 2005 Reporting Database. SQL Server 2005

System Architecture using IBM ESB Value Added § § § § Enterprise Messaging Request/Response Architecture Message Transformation Automated Process Flows Business Process Service Mediation Aggregation (FAN-IN; FAN-OUT) ESB Toolkit

Measuring EA Maturity MATURITY LEVELS BY CATEGORY § § § § Business Architecture Data Architecture Governance Planning Framework Architecture Blueprint Communication Compliance Integration Team Involvement Performance IT Implementation Overall EA Maturity 0 1 2 3 4 5

EA links Business and IT