Richard Willis

I’m regularly asked about whether it’s possible to link Moodle to school MIS systems. There’s a number of ways to link Moodle to Sims.Net or Facility CMIS, both open source and commercial and here’s a summary of the ones I know about. If you know of any others, or feel I’ve missed some information out, please let me know and I’ll add them.

Open Source

CLEO MIS Upload Tool

The CLEO tool was originally developed by Dan Poltawski for the CLEO Regional Broadband Consortium. It’s not a fully automatic tool as you need to create a csv file from your MIS system first. It then simplifies the process of creating users and courses from the data. Once the tool has been run, changes in Sims/Facility CMIS are not automatically reflected in Moodle. I think that if you re-export the data and re-run the tool it will update the courses, but I’m not sure about that. This tool will run with any MIS system you can export csv files from. Suport is via the Moodle forums notably this thread.


The Definitive Guide to SIMS.net, Moodle and LDAP Integration by Penfold_99

Penfold_99 is a highly active EduGeek member who has posted documentation and scripts on how to link Moodle to Sims. The documentation can be found on the Moodle Docs site. It consists of VB scripts to populate Active Directory from Sims, and then a number of scripts to create views in the Sims database so that the enable external database setting for creating courses can be used. It also includes a module to show the timetable from Sims within Moodle. Penfold_99 has given a lot of support on the Edugeek forums around setting it up, for example this thread. This is an automatic solution as Moodle is looking directly at the Sims database. The AD provisioning is run as a scheduled task. You don’t need to use the AD provisioning, but you do need a pupil identifier (their UPN) in a certain field in AD as the integration depends on using Active Directory authorisation in Moodle.

There’s now a sticky thread on this on Edugeek http://www.edugeek.net/forums/virtual-learning-platforms/28487-definitive-guide-sims-net-moodle-ldap-integration.html.

Guy Thomas’s Facility to Moodle Integration Block

Guy Thomas from the Ossett School has developed a Moodle block to integrate Moodle with Facility CMIS. It allows the bulk creation of pupil and parent accounts, and also a teacher to add Facility CMIS teaching groups a Moodle course. The initial creation of accounts is done manually through the Moodle front-end as it is a Moodle block, but there are then scheduled tasks to keep the pupil, parents and teaching group membership synchronised. The documentation it comes with looks good and Guy provides support via the Moodle forums. It does require initial preparation of Active Directory and your existing Moodle accounts to ensure that they all have the Facility CMIS Student ID in to make sure Moodle knows which user is which in Facility.

Commercial

Salamander Moodle from SalamanderSoft

I’m obviously biased about this one. It will automatically create student, staff and parent accounts from the data in your MIS system  (Sims, Facility CMIS, Phoenix, Integris, any csv file or database I can figure out the schema for). It will also create courses based on your criteria, if you can describe it I should be able to do it e.g. course per teaching group or course per subject year combination with teaching groups as Moodle groups. The provisioning is run as scheduled tasks so not quite live. I update the database directly, so if there’s other items you’d like doing I should be able to figure it out.

Which should I go for?

That’s entirely up to you and what you want out of the integration. The advantages of the Open Source solutions are that the cash price is £0 and you are contributing to the community by using them. The downside is that it can take a long time to get them working in your network and you are reliant on the goodwill, inclination and availability of the writers for support (so far the support from all the above open source tools looks pretty good). For commercial solutions, it’s pretty much the opposite, it’s going to cost you money, but will take less of your time sorting it out and the commercial company will be responsible for making sure it works and keeps working.

I’ve just been looking at the server statistics and have noticed that I’ve had several hits from people who had searched for Facility CMIS web parts or serco CMIS web parts. Just to let you know that I’m currently working on some web parts for Facility CMIS ready to release in January at BETT.

These will cover areas like My Details, timetable, attendance, assessment etc, for pupils, staff and parents. If anyone is interested then drop me a line at miswebparts@salamandersoft.co.uk and I’ll keep you updated on progress.

One of my customers asked if I could help him with displaying House Points in SharePoint. The school had already decided that they wanted a House Point system, in the network managers words, like Harry Potter, and the network manager had figured out a way of assigning them by modifying the behaviour events in CMIS to have positive or negative points. What he needed from me was a query to retrieve the total points for the Houses from CMIS to display in a chart on their smart boards and also in SharePoint and then once that was done some more detailed information for the logged in pupil.

Creating the query was a case of figuring out the database structure. As all the events are configurable, it was a little tricky, but once I’d got my head round it, it was straight-forward enough. That took care of their smart boards as they came with built in charting facilities. For SharePoint, I could have created a charting web part, but I had a bit of a look round first, and came up with Bamboo solutions Chart Web Part. This had the advantage of already working, multiple chart formats and the school could re-use it if they had any other charting requirements. The only tricky bit with the Bamboo web part is that the school wanted each column as a different colour so I had to turn the result into a pivot table which is not the easiest in SQL Server.

That was the charts sorted, now we wanted to display for a pupil when they are logged in:
1.  The pupil’s house
2.  A summary of their points: total, total positive and total negative
3.  The details of each event together with the points scored.
4.  A summary of the points for all the houses: again total, total positive and total negative

To enable this I created the Data Viewer web part I talked about in my last post. This enabled me to display the above information just by writing a new query, which was simple as I already understood the database structure and the pupil’s ID was already stored in Active Directory.
Result was a site showing all the House Point information requested. It looks good and hopefully will inspire the pupils to make a success of the House system.