IMS recently released a white paper with the un-catchy but informative title “Adoption of Service Oriented Architecture for Enterprise Systems in Education: Recommended Practices“. While it is fair to say that no publication on SOA can avoid someone taking issue with something, this paper does a pretty good job of meeting its aims of providing those in the (mostly post-compulsory) education technology audience with relevant information on the reasons why they should at least consider service orientation and how they might go about moving in that direction.

“Education has many unique challenges associated with integrating business and academic processes and technologies.  This Recommended Practices for Education on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) from IMS Global Learning Consortium filters the information on the current state of SOA concepts, tools and practices and provides guidance on when adoption of SOA is appropriate in Education to overcome some of its core challenges.” (from IMS)

We (CETIS) produced a complementary look at the service-orientation back in March 2009, which we will update in 2010, with a similarly un-catchy but informative (we hope) title “Technology Change in Higher and Further Education – a service oriented approach“.

Enjoy…