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At GoingOn, I’m in charge of working with our clients on systems integration. Integration means a lot of different things to different people but here I’m referring to connecting existing systems for a seamless experience in navigating from one system to the other. In short this usually means single sign-on or trusted system point integrations. GoingOn supports a variety of single sign-on and trusted system integrations including

• CAS
• Shibboleth
• IMS BLTI (Basic Learning Tools Interoperability)
• Custom SSO solutions
• and the list is growing. Deeper integrations are possible and indeed planned, but more often than not, connectivity is the first step and primary concern

I was reading through the National Survey of Student Engagement report (NSSE, or affectionately called “Nessie”) as well as an Inside Higher Ed Article about it which got me thinking:

Why do we go to all the effort to deploy SaaS e-learning systems and integrate them with other learning systems within the institution?

Implementation of social learning systems is definitely a trend in education, but we should never lose sight of the real end goals. “Nessie” attempts to back up questions around student engagement with hard numbers. One of the findings in “Nessie” indicates that students who live on-campus interact with a more diverse group than those not living on campus. Implementation of an Academic Engagement Network is one of the things that an institution can do to help remote students feel more connected and engaged with an institution. And integrating the GoingOn Academic Engagement Network with the learning ecosystem improves its accessibility and consequently adoption. While having an Academic Engagement Network and making it easily accessible by students does not in and of itself improve student engagement, it is a first step in designing engaging social environments for remote students.

Planning

So, enough of the strategic talk. Let’s talk a little bit about the deployment and integration planning.

Implementation of a SaaS solution is easier than deployment of enterprise software within the institution’s IT infrastructure. While the technical deployment is simplified because it is a SaaS solution, there are a number of things that are still required to make your deployment successful.

Whether you are deploying a Student Information System, LMS, or Academic Engagement Network; in house developed, off the shelf, or SaaS solution, your planning process is paramount to the success of the deployment. Planning is more than just putting the implementation to a timeline. It is more about managing change, setting expectations and defining realistic goals that align with your institution’s goals. There are a number of things that need to be planned for with the deployment of your system: Scope, Communication Planning, Resource Planning, and the Community Strategy itself.

In this post, I’m focusing on the deployment of the GoingOn Academic Engagement Network and its integration with your other systems. Before starting an integration project, we need to ask a few questions, which determine how we will approach the integration.

• Is the deployment going to be a full institution wide deployment?
• Is this an exploratory pilot?
• Is this a departmental launch as the first phase of the full institutional deployment?

Data Integration

For all of the integrations we do, a certain level of data integration is necessary. Users need to be created that are mapped to their CAS or Shibboleth user IDs and memberships need to be created in their communities. While CAS and Shibboleth can both be configured to create local users on first visit, BLTI requires that the user be Pre-existing, therefore it needs to be supplemented to utilize the IMS -LIS web services to create the user before attempting to connect. GoingOn is also in the process of implementing a batch data integration based on the IMS-LIS standard. This would allow institutions to extract information from the SIS to create users, communities, and memberships based on a student’s information.

When introducing this type of integration, it is important to plan for the altered workflow introduced into the user and account provisioning mechanisms currently in place at the institution, and make arrangements with the necessary support organizations to handle issues. One common problem is timing and sequencing of events for user creation across the various authentication systems and sources.

A single blog posting won’t answer all the questions around integrating SaaS systems; in fact we’re just scratching the surface here. But, I’ll post other thoughts as they occur to me. If you have experiences in systems deployment and integration that you’d like to share, I’m sure our readers would like to hear from you; especially those stories of… “If I had to do it over again, I would…”

I look forward to your comments.