PhillipHamlyn

Well, as a taxpayer, I hope they haven't spent too much of my money on it before deciding to can it.

All, The next major release of InTouch will remove the requirement for a VPN and callback service in the school. In place of the current need for our central servers to call into the school (with attendant requirements for firewall routing into the school server) we are replacing that component with a regular "heartbeat" call from the school's InTouch server to the InTouch server farm. This is intended to simplify maintenance, installation and provide a more robust environment for server changes etc. This is currently targetted for release in 2014. There are other changes and improvements to InTouch which will be communicated through the normal channels via our product management team; but as this specific technical issue came up in this thread, I thought it would be useful to let the community knew what we were working on in this regard. Phillip Hamlyn

matt40k, I understand what you are saying, and the two roles are quite seperate. The DX in the business case that I saw did not allow for suspense rules at the DX hub - if a school wanted to prevent their in-school data being updated by another user of the DX hub (for whatever purpose, one of which is CTF) there was no requirement for a school to be able to do this. Sending data to the DX hub required a reciprocal capability of automatically receiving data from the DX hub. This makes sense from an architectural point of view, but not perhaps from a cultural point of view. I personally believe head teachers in schools would not wish to have their students data updated from a remote system without being able to accept or eyeball the changes - especially if they did not form part of an accepted process such as CTF. I think some kind of in-school suspense processing would be a strong desire of many school data managers. The DX facility is designed to make data transfer almost real-time and this changes the business process in the school from one where they "import" data (via S2S/email/DVD whatever transport mechanism) and follow a process to ingest the data, to one where their data is "automatically" up to date, becasue they are participating in the DX facility. Its not really an architectural question but a business culture one, so I'm probably not best placed to say what would be acceptible to a school data manager; as I'm not one of them.

matt40k, I can certainly see how the manual steps would be eliminated in the future, but when I saw it there is nothing in the scope that allowed a school to reject or otherwise interfere (suspend) incoming data from the DX hub - in your illustration you indicate that CTF scoped data would be coming into a school from another (via DfE), assuming its part of a current CTF business process flow. My understanding is that schools will be required to accept data from the DfE whose scope is CTF but which might have been altered for an some other purpose by an some other author and the data subject might be currently present in their school (i.e. not being inducted into their school). This I think is the thorny issue, but it may be that the current business case puts more process behind the process of accepting data changes into a school than when I first saw it.

matt40k, Speaking personally (see my sig) I can see how removing the delay between data input and it being available to the DfE and other parties would be a major step forward for accuracy within the DfE and participating providers, and perhaps make it much easier to understand the effect of policy decisions on measurable outcomes. Its important (for me) to highlight the two way transfer between schools and the department illustrated in the slide deck (P24, P25, P27-FR1), and the fact that there is no school to school transfer (as later documents indicate the industry preference for Hub+Spoke P38). On P49 it defines the scope of data (only that essential to the dept and to support "devolved self improvement") which one could take to indicate that individual school policy specific data such as behaviour tracking might not be included. Since part of the business case is to eliminate CTF this means all the data currently in CTF should be automatically imported into the school with minimum human intervention (and CTF covers an aweful lot of student data). The data coverage of the CTF format did not indicate at the supplier meeting that this was to support the CTF process (of moving a student from school to school) but the scope of data included in a CTF. At that meeting this was not going to be restricted to messages and technical information but represented a two-way flow between DfE and School - this (in my view) is probably the most technically demanding issue for suppliers (and perhaps schools) to manage. As I said in an earlier post, this information may have changed since publication and other contributors may have a more up-to-date view of the DfE business case.

pcstru, The following link gives the publicly available information presented at the Supplier Launch Event which contains a slide deck from the DfE on their concept of the scope at that date. The link also has regular information bulletins on progress/changes https://online.contractsfinder.businesslink.gov.uk/Common/View%20Notice.aspx?site=1000&lang=en&noticeid=1282858&fs=true. Phillip Hamlyn

GREED, The 2 way transfer was in scope at the supplier consultation event (suppliers were asked to provide outline cost estimates for two way transfers), and it was the recommendation of the technical focus group to seperate out the School -> Dfe and the Dfe -> School transfers, so I'm glad to hear this has in fact occured. Phillip

GREED, Understood, but the route will be School A ->Dfe-> School B ? So not direct school to school ? Correct me if I've got out of date info. Phillip

From the technical perspective of a supplier, the key difference between the DX project and the various school census it replaces is the requirement to feed data back into schools automatically from the DfE data warehouse; a data flow which does not exist outside of CTF, and then only for a limited data set encompassed by the CTF. A technican may argue that submitting changes from the school through to the DfE via a more immediate protocol than Termly/ad-hoc would just make the data held and analysed at the centre more timely with the same level of accuracy; but perhaps a realist would admit that the "operational gap" between the entering the data which contributes to the census, and the actual validation it and submission of it, reprepsents a good quality assurance process, which will be eliminated or reduced if the data were submitted immediately (or near real time). The DX protocol as I currently understand it does not envisage schools blocking or suspending the outward flow of data to the DfE, and the ambition is to get near-real-time data from the school eliminating all termly or scheduled data collections. The most problematic issue which arose when we designed the B2B protocol/product that led to us implementing some quite comprehensive suspense rules and protocols, was the issue of data owership. A good example might be 1) If a child tells their school, via a letter from a parent, that they have moved house; the school enters the data, thereby updating the LA/Dfe (potentially). 2) If the LA is informed the child has moved house through some other channel, and update the school database via a data synch product (B2B, DX etc); but the school staff are not positively informed (i.e. not in the update loop), then who is the data owner ? and who is the guarantor of data quality ? I'm sure there might be specific legal definitions in these cases, but as I understand it it is the school who registers themselves as the data controllers currently, so are responsible for the accuracy of the data they hold ? Our answer to this was to introduce in our product suspense capabilities allowing recipients of data to "hold" updates in suspense until they had eyeballed them and either rejected or accepted them. We believe that this same process will be potentially required within the school with the rollout of DX, and this will in fact increase the data administration tasks done by a school, depending on the volume of changes received through the DX channel. It may well be that these two facilities of DX (submission from school to Dfe and from DfE to school) are implemented in seperate phases, but at present I don't have any information to indicate that this will be so. To comment on another line of conversation in this thread and based on my understanding of the goals, scope and business case of the DX project; it will explicitly not address data transfer school->school or data transfers within a school. Its a school->Dfe->school data transfer protocol (that might happen to make CTF obsolete). This may have changed since my brief involvement in reviewing the technical approach, but I believe its unlikely. Phillip Hamlyn

Matt40k, Do you know why I called the SIMS7 main applicaiton Pulsar.exe ? Its because the internal name of the product was Super Star, Star being the internal product name of the previous edition. Thus a Pulsar is a Super Star. Geeky but my kind of in-joke. I'll try and inject some levity :-)

vikpaw, As I said in an earlier post, we are going to convert all our existing Silverlight tech to HTML, thus the usefulness to us of candidates with Silverlight expertise. :-)

pwainewright, Thanks for your comments, I can see that the concept of "software as a service" means much more to you in its architectural design than the raw definition implies. You are pulling in concepts from open API systems, software design stuctures, low operational cost (as opposed to low price), shared infrastructure (not neccessarily, in my opinion, a good thing on a business critical system), and high bandwidth connectivity. I'm not pushing back on your definition of SaaS but is a lot more extensive a shopping list than I'd expected to be loaded onto it. Very much food for thought.

Matt40k, Does that mean data cross schools, or just the data within a school ? I can see that, for example, Fisher Family Trust provide a "Big Data Insight" service to the education market, is this the kind of thing you mean ?

Bromcom-PR, I take your point but some of the offerings on G-cloud are virtual desktop environments with full desktop versions of Microsoft Office (not just browser) available to the end user (vendor is InsightCloud) . I'm not sure this falls within NIST or not but if a remote desktop version of an SosaaS is deemed "Cloud" by G-Cloud then I think its a useful extra definition of "what makes a cloud application Cloud'y". In this example the vendor provides user interfaces "Browser, Other, Client Side Virtual Application" which does indicate they support some level of client side deployment (even if its App Streaming or somesuch). Personally I'd love to know how those chaps offering virtual desktops full of Office productivity software avoid the inefficiencies of hosted desktop software that you described in your earlier post - in general its very difficult to achieve elasticity for remote application hosting. Time to get hunting for some technical background on their offering I think :-)

Greed, We've met before - I presented at the EduGeek Conference with my colleague a few years ago on the subject of the movement to "industrial computing" clouds. My post is Chief Architect at Capita SIMS. I'm interested in this thread because the definition of SaaS is slippery and despite some formally proposed definitions, it definitely means different things to different people; for some it means "cheap, reliable software that I dont own" (the minimalist point of view) all they way to very specific technologies; I need to make sure I am keeping up with the communities aspirations in this regard, not just what the formal definitions are stating. As an example; would the community be satisified that a "app" delivered solution which stored its data in the Cloud but was locally installed (like all iOS Apps) was a valid SaaS application, or does the local install invalidate it, irrespective of the cost-free nature of the installation ? Where do people perceive the highest value of an SaaS application to be - purely financial (i.e. its cheaper than an on-premises solution) or is there a need for it to conform to some other principals (and if so, what is that need being driven from) ?

Hi Bromcom-PR, I think you make the point very well; given all the information you provide from the UK Government Cloud paper, the UK G-Cloud still allows the provision of SosaaS to be presented for rental to government customers. I recognise that SosaS is nowhere near as efficient (if centrally hosted - not just centrally managed and provisioned) than an equivalent zero-state application design, but this measurement of efficiency would be evident to potential customers because it would be reflected in the service charge to the customer - inefficient centrally hosted applications will be more expensive to rent than efficient centrally hosted ones. The G-Cloud does not insist however that any application is centrally hosted; just centrally and efficiently provisioned, and available at a published price. So; apart from the cost benefits (gained by efficient application design) that are expected to be delivered by a SaaS solution, whats the group's weighted shopping list of features (interoperability has been mentioned by mikecampbell, but presumably there are others such as device independence etc) that are not strictly anything to do with SaaS but are expected to be delivered via a SaaS application ? What does SaaS mean to the community other than the raw "centrally provisioned, and not perpetually owned" definition ?

I've read this thread with interest, and obviously I'm speaking from the point of view of a software supplier rather than consumer, but I think that many people are overloading the basic Software as a Service definiton with a lot of additional concepts (all of them progressive) but which doesn't really get delivered by SaaS. For instance the Gartner definition of SaaS (Gartner IT Glossary - Software as a Service (SaaS)) says "software that is owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers". It doesn't incorporate any concepts of elasticity, cost, integration or technology. It doesn't even have to be run remotely - just delivered and managed remotely. The definition crucially talks about how a customer pays for the service delivered by software; which seems to be an important move away from "owning software in perpetuity" to "paying to use a service delivered via software". As an extreme example Adobe delivers its Photoshop application on-demand with updates remotely managed and delivered, on a subscription basis. This qualifies under the Gartner definition as a SaaS model of delivery. Its not browser based or "integrated" any further than the "perpetually owned" version, so I guess this would be your "SosaaS" example. The NIST definition defines the Cloud Software as a Service in similar terms "The capability provided to the consumer is to use the provider’s applications running on a cloud infrastructure" - how the provider provides elasticity (or even whether it does so efficiently) isn't a consideration. The NIST does say "Note: Cloud software takes full advantage of the cloud paradigm by being service oriented with a focus on statelessness, low coupling, modularity, and semantic interoperability." but doesn't define why the "Cloud Paradigm" delivers any of this within its own definition of Cloud - I suspect what they wanted to say was "HTML REST" rather than Cloud. I'm guessing that everyone here's expectation of a cloud delivered MIS would be HTML + REST (which would be a sensible assumption). I would be very interested in the groups weighted shopping list of capabilities above and beyond "remotely managed and delivered, and subscription based payment" that would attract you to a "true cloud" application rather than, say, a Browser Terminal Services hosted existing MIS (which fulfills the definition of SaaS) ?

LosOjos, In a nutshell, that is also our philosophy. In the past we have interfaced with Microsoft products simply because they were the product ranges our customers most bought and were present in their schools - but in the Cloud world customers have a larger choice of broadly comparable and compatible products, and I was trying to fish out whether the community had a opinion of whether there was a general move by schools to online-only products like O365 and Google Docs, or whether they still predominantly looked for a desktop document authoring product. It would be actually substantially more difficult for us to interface with a locally installed application than their cloudy brethern.

CAM, Document Composition (i.e. generating docs) will be done within the cloud in a browser based SIMS but at present we do not know which is the most popular output formats - Google Docs support Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF 1.2) , Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office 365 also support this format, so we are likely to target the underlying common format for publications unless there is a strong feeling that there is a better option. In terms of document storage once the documents have been composed in SIMS, we would expect to write them to a URL based destination - and we will include a basic document repository in a future SIMS just like we do in SIMS.net - the question is whether O365/GDocs will attain sufficient penetration into schools for us to consider making that document repository a user option - i.e. that they will likely already have their own O365/GDocs repository ?

vikpaw, I'm interested in what connectivity issues you experience with O365 - would they be the same for any "cloud" based system ?

zag, Thanks for those suggestions. It is our intention to make it fully HTML compliant but we need to bear in mind that the user interface that works well on a desktop or laptop does not always translate well onto a finger-driven device. We've seen how Microsoft tried to force desktop users to use an interface designed for touch users in their Metro application design, so we are cognisant of the different needs of different sets of users, using different devices. Technically any HTML based client will work on a tablet, phone, and big screen mouse driven desktop; but they might be very different experiences to make best use of those devices; however I was personally stunned (in a positive way) to see customers using SIMS.net on Terminal Services on an iPad recently, so our basic thrust is to make sure primarily that it does work, and tailor the UX as needed for those devices.

pete, As you can understand, I can't comment or disclose a great deal of technical information about our future product ranges, not least of which because technology is a very moveable feast, but our initial version approaching initial release in Northern Ireland do include Silverlight components but by the time it is on general release it will include no plugins or proprietary client technology and will work on an HTML compliant browser. I have a question for the community - what percentage of your schools use or are planning to use Office 365 or Google Apps (with associated Drive and SkyDrive document storage) for their main line-of-business office automation ? As technical people, what is your feeling for the level of adoption these platforms will eventually reach within schools, and are these mainly driven by license cost, operating simplicity, total-cost-of-ownership, or reach across devices ?

I suspect its doing Federated Authentication - essentially it issues your browser with a Cookie of a specific, given name, and services which comply with their FA will look at for that specific cookie on each call to their web services/web page. The consuming service or application then "accepts" the cookie as being a guarantor of the users identity. A problem if you turn off cookies of course. This is how most browser based SSO systems work, although Microsoft Windows based applications will tend to use the Windows Authentication system which isn't "federated" but "centralised".

Again; not specific to TASC; but do you consider sending a password via plain text email a security risk ? I realise its a one-time-password, but emails aren't generally encrypted and many ISPs dont insist on SSL email transport. I'm interested because we've often been asked to consider a mixture of email, physical post or verbally transmitting "first passwords" by clients on various products, and its really difficult without using multiple transport mechanisms to get a level of security which satisfies the most stringent critics; and most schools would balk at the postage costs that (for instance) banks are happy to accept to send out their first-use passwords to customers. Phillip

"The best bit of feedback we got from the test users was the ease of logging in. They found it really easy to use the 5 digit upercase password that was changed on first login. " Out of interest, and not specifically related to TASC, how do you normally distribute first-time passwords to users (either parental, student or staff) ? Do schools prefer to email in general, or face-to-face (such as at parents evenings) etc ? Phillip Hamlyn