Unity, Active Directory & VLE's

[kennysarmy]

Does anyone have any experience with the Ramesys product UNITY?

We had a presentation this week and it seems it could be useful.

Would suck data out of SIMS and populate AD.

Would allow staff/students access to their H:\ drives remotely.

Would allow parents access to some SIMS data.

 

We are looking at going down the MOOLDE route for our VLE and not the RAMESYS offering which is ASSIMILATE.

 

RAMESYS stated that if we went with ASSIMILATE it would populate itself with all the classes/courses from AD.

 

But can AD hold classes and course information?

 

With my limited knowledge I thought AD held user accounts, computers accounts and groups. Would it make use of groups somehow?

 

 

And if the information is in AD could we not push it out to MOODLE instead?

 

UNITY does also not offer remote access to other network drives just the users H:\ drive.

 

Do other schools get round this by placing all content material on the VLE anyway?

[mleighton]

Not used Unity or Assimilate, but can talk to you about AD and SIMS!

 

You are right - class info is not stored in the AD. This would have to be pulled out of SIMS by your VLE, or by a provisioning tool. We use Sharepoint, and have a provisionsing tool which takes the class info from SIMS and sets it up as sites and groups/permissions in Sharepoint. Not sure how Ramesys suggest their product woudl do that unless they have a provisioning tool of some kind to run in conjunction with it.

 

The only VLE I know if which allows users to write back to SIMS in Capitas Learning Gsatewya - this is mainly because SIMS do not provide info on how to access their SQL data safely for writing, only for reading. Thus several VLEs will state they are SIMS integrated, but this is a one way channel not two way.

 

If you want to see what the SIMS web parts look like then look at the Blatchington Mill site in the gallery on the kraal - SharePoint Design, Web Parts, and ICT in the Online Education Community.

 

Hope that is of some help.

[kmount]

There are other players which can write back into the SIMS db.

 

A list of SQL and Technical partners can be found on Capita's website.

[CyberNerd]

And if the information is in AD could we not push it out to MOODLE instead?

yes, there are a few posts on how to integrate Moodle with SIMS and AD so that moodle can self populates users and courses.

With certain plugins (smb web client) moodle can access homedrives too.

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/virtual-learning-platforms/13309-moodle-sims-integration.html

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/virtual-learning-platforms/25567-moodle-sims-windows.html

[Tonyoung]

Does anyone have any experience with the Ramesys product UNITY?

We had a presentation this week and it seems it could be useful.

Would suck data out of SIMS and populate AD.

Would allow staff/students access to their H:\ drives remotely.

Would allow parents access to some SIMS data.

 

 

We had a good look at this product. Quite liked what we saw but were concerned about the lack of referenceability and links to SIMS. They are not a Capita listed partner so they could not give firm answers on interoperability. We would consider again if they could provide a list of schools for us to talk to in the South Mids / North London area.

[platform55]

How come you are looking at using Assimilate and Moodle?

Would it not make more sense to use a full MLE which encompasses a VLE, communications and management, MIS integration, integration with library and your website?

 

We use LP+ and we get all the above which delivers a much more user centric experience (SSO to everything embedded into the platform).

 

As far as user groups and class sites goes, our pulls the data from SIMS and creates the relevant groups in AD and in the learning platform. This means that when a student moves from class to class this dynamically updates the learning platform to reflect this. Its important that it works in this way so that its up to date and seemless so you dont receive conflicts (teachers will get very upset if its not accurately reflecting their class day to day.

 

Happy to show you some parts of our platform if you send me your email address.

 

Ta

[CyberNerd]

H

As far as user groups and class sites goes, our pulls the data from SIMS and creates the relevant groups in AD and in the learning platform. This means that when a student moves from class to class this dynamically updates the learning platform to reflect this. Its important that it works in this way so that its up to date and seemless so you dont receive conflicts (teachers will get very upset if its not accurately reflecting their class day to day.

 

Our moodle has been doing this for the last two years (only one year with sims though)

[matt40k]

Prefer SLG2. Even tho it's another Capita\Microsoft product. Moodle ways looks good as well.