SIF Association AU engages marketplace with EduTECH ‘Interoperability Tour’ and HITS

WASHINGTON - Aug. 12, 2014 - PRLog -- June saw the first phase of NSIP's SIF market engagement initiative come to fruition at the EduTECH 2014 conference in Brisbane.  The largest education technology event in the southern hemisphere (over 5000 attendees, 243 speakers and 220 exhibitors), featured a National Schools Interoperability Program (NSIP) sponsored tour by education jurisdiction CIOs to visit exhibitors selected for their focus on interoperability.  This was supported by the first public unveiling of the Australian HITS (Hub Integration Testing Service), an online service designed to allow solution creators and service providers to explore the use of SIF for connecting their products with jurisdictional data, and growing the eco-system of applications and solutions available to schools.

HITS acts as a showcase for all that is embodied in the 'SIF 3.0: Simple. Secure. Standard.' message from the SIF community, and feedback from jurisdictional CIOs and vendors at the conference was overwhelmingly positive, and the next phase of implementation is now underway.

Working with the largest education jurisdiction in Australia (New South Wales), the SIF Association AU are now constructing use-cases within HITS to support the jurisdiction in enabling choice in schools.  In this first implementation, this means that schools will be able to choose timetabling packages from a pool of vendors, all of whom will exchange data with NSW central systems using SIF.

Beyond this initial implementation more jurisdictions are preparing use cases for their own market engagements, and these will be delivered in HITS over the coming year.

HITS is sponsored as an initiative by the Australian Government precisely to position SIF as a key mechanism for market development.  HITS already proved a success in gaining mind-share with educators and vendors for the ‘SIF is Simple' message, and the ongoing delivery of real-world business support will cement our ability to deliver on its promise over the coming year.

For more information on ‘SIF 3.0: Simple. Secure. Standard.' please visit the SIF Association website (sifassociation.org).

For more information on HITS, please visit the NSIP website (nsip.edu.au)

About the SIF Association

The SIF Association is a unique, non-profit collaboration composed of over 3,200 schools, districts, local authorities, states, US and International Ministries of Education, software vendors and consultants who collectively define the rules and regulations for educational software data interoperability. The SIF Implementation Specification enables diverse applications to interact and share data efficiently, reliably, and securely regardless of the platform hosting those applications. The SIF Association has united these education technology end users and providers in an unprecedented effort to give teachers more time to do what they do best: teach.  For further information, visit sifassociation.org.