What's on offer for Technical Integrators

We have conversations with potential new technical integrators (TI) many times each month and the conversation usually begins with: "Our application needs some data from SIMS..." Our role is to help potential TIs to make an informed call as to whether this is a sensible investment and to point them in the most efficient direction to get the data required.

To give informed advice, we will need to know:

• The data you need out of SIMS
• The data you want to put back
• How frequently you need to exchange data
• The volume of data/workload involved.

There is no obligation to tell us what you need the data for but the better we understand your requirements, the better tailored our advice will be.

Will there be a cost?

In most cases the answer will be "yes".  The first port of call is our commercial site where you can find out about becoming a TI and see our programme overview document. The more you require from ESS, the more it will cost but costs can be as low as a few pounds for a small MAT to extract data from OneRoster. We provide a cost calculator to help you to estimate our charges.

What Next?

Can we get the data from a Web API?

The answer is "possibly". You will need to look at RAP (our standards) and OneRoster (International Standard) to see if the limited data available meets your needs. If it does, you can build an interface to web APIs which will work for SIMS 7 and SIMS Next Gen using the same code base.  

For our next generation software, SIMS Next Gen, all the interfaces are via web API (see the 'Future Vision' section below).

Can we have Single Sign On?

Yes, you can. Note that your application will invite a SIMS user to sign in to your application. The application can check for valid cookies before it pops up the login. We/the cookie will provide a validated organisation ID and the external ID of the person logged in. We authenticate them but your application needs to decide what data they can see. If your application exchanges data with SIMS then there is typically a further set of client credentials upon whose authority data flows which means that the user's access rights in SIMS have no connection with the request for data. Your application must decide who can see any data that is contained within or accessed via their application's credentials.

What's the alternative to Web APIs?

Pre-Requisite: A copy of SIMS 7 with training data installed on the developer's PC (or proxy)

Many TIs have successfully followed the path of creating and maintaining an application that sits on a school's SIMS server (or proxy thereof) and exchanges data between SIMS and the TI's system. Typically this is a .Net Framework application in the form of a console application or Winforms application. The TI is responsible for writing, testing, deploying and maintaining their application.  

The simplest way to read data is to automate our reporting engine. SIMS is used to create the report and export it. The TI application simply automates the installation and running of the report. NB: This is read only. 

If more is needed then it is important to note that it is not difficult to write a basic application (for example one that reads and writes attendance marks) and there is a working sample available. More complex applications clearly take longer to create and there is a large documentation section which describes partner APIs available which will help but may not cover every possible TI's needs within SIMS. 

Support and Consultancy

If your needs are more complex, you may need a Support Contract or Consultancy Contract with us. These are covered in the links in the 'cost' section above. See below for examples of what each service covers.

Next Generation Software

All SIMS Next Gen APIs are web-based and OData compliant. Sample code and API documentation are available. At present, most of our customers use SIMS 7. 

Future Vision

Our direction of travel is to provide web-based APIs for all that we do. We aim to produce web APIs that work for both our current SIMS 7 product and our future SIMS Next Gen product and will start to make these available in 2022. However, if you write an application to interface with our next generation software, we intend that it would work for SIMS 7 and/or SIMS Next Gen at some point in time. The order of SIMS 7 API production determines when a TI application for SIMS Next Gen would work on SIMS 7.