I mentioned here recently that SunGard has committed to supporting IMS Learning Information Services in their next release, making them the second major SIS provider to do so. (Oracle, my employer, has supported it in Peoplesoft Campus Solutions for about a year now.) There’s a press release out from the IMS confirming this now, and also bringing the exciting news that Jenzabar “has also joined SunGard Higher Education and Oracle to support the LIS standard.” Also according to the press release, “Support from these three organizations means that LIS will be supported by suppliers that collectively comprise about two-thirds of the vendor-based, higher education student systems market in North America.”
Now, the Jenzabar announcement is news to me. I’m not sure if they’ve attended any working group meetings yet, and I’m also not sure if they’ve made a commitment to supporting LIS in a particular release yet. Still, this is another really solid step forward for the standard.
There are more LIS announcements to come, too.
JBAR just doesn’t want to be upstaged?
I’m not going to speculate on their motives right now. I’m hoping that they’re serious. It’s good for everybody if they implement.
Great News. The higher education student systems will have a terrific addition.
All-
My impression is that Jenzabar (note correct spelling) is serious about LIS (also Common Cartridge and LTI – although they have participated more actively in those groups). As with many IMS projects and many IMS members, they have been monitoring the development of the LIS specification over the last year and put in more resources when it gets to this stage (internal release). So, I am excited that we will see all three (Oracle, SunGard, and Jenzabar) supporting in the near term. Reducing the complexity of all the brittle point-to-point integrations in the education IT enterprise will allow savings of effort that can be applied to more important problems, i.e. how to better the lives of students, faculty, and administrators – and get better information out of the systems to guide that!
Best,
Rob