Since we're dealing with grades and other personal information the first thing I set about was running it over SSL.
Heh. Interesting. At my Place O' Employ we use WebCT (now, of course, all owned by the same company) and their response to me when I wanted to run it behind SSL as well, starting with Campus Edition. Hello?? FERPA, anyone?
As for prior art, I can say that I worked on the programming team for an LMS, complete with roles (people having different roles in different classes) from 1995.
But one of my MAJOR PEEVES? Why on earth do the SIAPI calls (remote manipulations that happen over https) not return any meaningful response to the caller? I suppose more fundamentally I should be asking, why on earth the user-management/course-management automation isn't also done with web services. But given that it isn't, I'm getting mighty tired of running code that uses SIAPI to automate user and course creation (given that we have 130,000 users, we HAVE to automate!), from another machine, and getting back responses that will only say "3 errors have occurred. Please check the webct.log for details." So, which 3 users didn't get created? No tellin'.
Not to mention, which webct.log is it even in? We've got 8 front ends running WebLogic, it could be on any one of them (although apparently we're going to dedicate one of those for remote app handling, if we do some fanciness with the load balancer).
Feh.
However, I'm with you that Vista is light years more "enterprise" than CE ever was. Now if they'd only make real web services calls for the stuff currently done with SIAPI, and get the "templates" manipulable remotely (they don't have IMS ids! Grr) I might be happier.
I will say that the existence of the web services and the fact that we CAN automate a lot of things (and hopefully make other pluggable modules) was a big factor in our choosing Vista.
I second your observations. Once I get to work with the programmers (I'm a programmer myself, writing glue) things are fine, but it's hard to GET to that stage. Every meeting, they send sales people/managers. I feel like saying, hey, you know? We bought it already. You can quit the sales pitch!
I'm from Urbana, we spent something like a year having a "bake off" to decide which of these products to use (we'd been using the non-enterprise versions of BOTH products, plus a homegrown thing). Verdict? They both suck (albeit in slightly different ways), but we gotta pick one. So we did.
Now when there are issues, we get complaints from the users, hey, why did you buy this if it has such problems? Well, we put out an RFP, with a requirement that the system run in Unix, and we got two replies, so there ya have it. So much for "the market will provide the perfect thing."
Personally I wish Illinois had more of a DIY philosophy like in the old days, but they've changed - it's about buying commercial stuff now. Still, the old quiz program I worked on had so much more in the way of quizzing (questions having students filling in Karnaugh maps and timing diagrams in engineering, for instance) than any of the commercial tools have, and so it's frustrating. Maybe we can work it as a plug in at some point.
Although, I hear the library school is doing some things with Sakai that sound interesting.
Anyway I'm one of the people that writes "glue" marrying this thing to all the various campus information, login, rosters, etc, and let's just say the back end has issues as well...
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Since we're dealing with grades and other personal information the first thing I set about was running it over SSL.
Heh. Interesting. At my Place O' Employ we use WebCT (now, of course, all owned by the same company) and their response to me when I wanted to run it behind SSL as well, starting with Campus Edition. Hello?? FERPA, anyone?
As for prior art, I can say that I worked on the programming team for an LMS, complete with roles (people having different roles in different classes) from 1995.
Web services are okay, yeah.
But one of my MAJOR PEEVES? Why on earth do the SIAPI calls (remote manipulations that happen over https) not return any meaningful response to the caller? I suppose more fundamentally I should be asking, why on earth the user-management/course-management automation isn't also done with web services. But given that it isn't, I'm getting mighty tired of running code that uses SIAPI to automate user and course creation (given that we have 130,000 users, we HAVE to automate!), from another machine, and getting back responses that will only say "3 errors have occurred. Please check the webct.log for details." So, which 3 users didn't get created? No tellin'.
Not to mention, which webct.log is it even in? We've got 8 front ends running WebLogic, it could be on any one of them (although apparently we're going to dedicate one of those for remote app handling, if we do some fanciness with the load balancer).
Feh.
However, I'm with you that Vista is light years more "enterprise" than CE ever was. Now if they'd only make real web services calls for the stuff currently done with SIAPI, and get the "templates" manipulable remotely (they don't have IMS ids! Grr) I might be happier.
I will say that the existence of the web services and the fact that we CAN automate a lot of things (and hopefully make other pluggable modules) was a big factor in our choosing Vista.
I second your observations. Once I get to work with the programmers (I'm a programmer myself, writing glue) things are fine, but it's hard to GET to that stage. Every meeting, they send sales people/managers. I feel like saying, hey, you know? We bought it already. You can quit the sales pitch!
Chicago, by any chance?
I'm from Urbana, we spent something like a year having a "bake off" to decide which of these products to use (we'd been using the non-enterprise versions of BOTH products, plus a homegrown thing). Verdict? They both suck (albeit in slightly different ways), but we gotta pick one. So we did.
Now when there are issues, we get complaints from the users, hey, why did you buy this if it has such problems? Well, we put out an RFP, with a requirement that the system run in Unix, and we got two replies, so there ya have it. So much for "the market will provide the perfect thing."
Personally I wish Illinois had more of a DIY philosophy like in the old days, but they've changed - it's about buying commercial stuff now. Still, the old quiz program I worked on had so much more in the way of quizzing (questions having students filling in Karnaugh maps and timing diagrams in engineering, for instance) than any of the commercial tools have, and so it's frustrating. Maybe we can work it as a plug in at some point.
Although, I hear the library school is doing some things with Sakai that sound interesting.
Anyway I'm one of the people that writes "glue" marrying this thing to all the various campus information, login, rosters, etc, and let's just say the back end has issues as well...