CMIS web parts

[NewOrder]

Is there any news about CMIS web parts for sharepoint?

I'm aware of connecting to ePortal through a single sign on from Sharepoint. Whilst this maybe ok for a single school sharepoint with its own AD it will not work for multipule school's on a hosted solution.

[k-strider]

An RM rep commented on this they were having a meeting with Serco sometime last week... thats all i heard about it i hope it works that would be great

[NewOrder]

Thanks I think they are more focussed on their own VLE and trying to integrate with that. Which could be to their detriment.

[john]

I thought they already had a Sharepoint add-in thingy?

[NewOrder]

Yes I heard there is but nothing. Smoke and mirrors ! unless someone tells me otherwise.

They have ePortal with their bitlets that would work in a similar way but with a webpart you do not need to logon in again. You can use single sign on through sharepoint.

[GrumbleDook]

Serco have been working on web parts for sometime now and the most that I have heard of are some screen shots and proof of concept tests.

[limbo]

The thing that worries me most about this is that even eportal, which is their own commercial product, and therefore you would expect as effecient as they can get it, does not access all the data live - it has to build a cache of data to ensure it can get hold of it quick enough.

This would suggest that a sharepoint connector would also need to have some form of cache to be able to access it quick enough.

I am guessing a lot of this cached data is for reports on whole class groups rather than an individual student as these require thirty-odd times the amount of data - but even so, you would have though if it is possible to get the data live for sharepoint then they could do it for eporta.

[NewOrder]

Webparts and caching I see that as a no no. That defeats the object.

The latest SQL has repoting services that allow reports to be put in to web parts? I hope to get around to this in the summer.

[john]

I would think that it would be fine, If your servers are powerful enough searching SQL cannot be that intensive, my sharepoints ballooned in size recently, so its now 3x the size of my CMIS DB, and it searches quicker than that does. Just plenty of ram in the box and away you go as Sharepoint is a hungry beast.

[GrumbleDook]

I'm at a meeting tomorrow where to advanced CMIS schools will be around. I will accost them on your behalf about what they know.

[limbo]

I do currently manage to pull data out directly from the CMIS SQL into our VLE - assessment data is the slowest because you have to convert it which requires three different tables to be accessed in order to extract a single assessment result for a single student, including searching for text within a string.

Attendance can be equally as difficult - especially if you want to look at the lesson by lesson registration rather than just the session attendance. This requires you to do some heft calculations in order to be able to work out which column and row you want data from within a table.

If you are pretty streamlined with your code then it is quick enough to get lots of data out about a single student - but if you want a lot of information about a lot of students then I think it will hit a serious speed bump.

And I cannot see a way around it without a major rework of the way the tables are structured, or introducing cached tables into the data - a bit like the sessional attendance ones that are already there.

[GrumbleDook]

Ok

I have had a chat with a few schools and one of them is a Serco partner school down Plymouth way ... they have them and are working on the SSO at the moment.

Some information is drawn into the Sharepoint web part, but to make changes it loads up an ePortfolio window, but with the changes you can make to the CSS it looks exactly the same ... pretty seemless.

More information when I get it but hopefully this might help describe how it can be used.