SIF in Edubuntu

[Miles Berry]

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Tom Hoffman wrote:
(lots of really informative stuff about SIF)
...
> Moodle also needs to know
> who is in the school.  Eventually we want these three applications to
> share this data.  Without SIF, we'll need specific components to make
> SchoolTool work with Moodle & LDAP, and they will probably end up
> being somewhat brittle and inflexible.  Each additional app we
> interact with will require more custom code.  If a Zone Integration
> Server is included in Edubuntu, each of these would just require a
> single SIF "agent" to be written that allows them to work with the
> server.  That is a non-trivial, but well-defined technical problem. 
> Once those agents were written, data sharing between all these
> applications would be flexible and reliable.
There was some interest in this on moodle.org a year or so back - have a
glance at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=5674 (you can log in
as guest to read)
> 
> Writing an open source Zone Integration Server or SIF agents for
> applications is not the kind of thing that people do spontaneously or
> for fun, so if this is going to happen, it will need to be funded from
> somewhere.  Government funding for this kind of work is still pretty
> avant garde in the US, but is seems like a real possibility in the UK.
> 
Ahh, you'd be surprised - it might be worth raising this idea again over
on moodle.org - perhaps the authentication forum? I believe someone in
the US is about to release a presumably commercial SIF agent for Moodle,
and there may be others.

You'll have heard of shibboleth no doubt? My understanding is that this
can pass some of the student information, including group membership to
web-based services like Moodle and (some) document repositories - I saw
 a cool demo of Moodle doing automatic login from a shiboleth identity
server last week. Perhaps  another to add to an expanding schooltool
feature list!
> --Tom
> 


- --
Miles Berry
Deputy Head
St Ives School Haslemere
www.stiveshaslemere.com
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