Zone Integration Server (ZIS)
Updated: January 3, 2006
One of the biggest challenges facing the K-12 community is the lack of software interoperability. Without it, data sharing, data reporting and data-driven decision making are very costly endeavors for schools, districts and departments of education. To address this issue, Microsoft has teamed with educators and industry leaders in developing the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF). SIF is an industry-supported technical blueprint for K-12 software that will enable diverse applications to interact and share data seamlessly. A critical component of SIF is a specification for a Zone Integration Server (ZIS) which serves as the data integration broker between applications that support SIF.
The ZIS is designed to help software vendors, school IT staff and school administrators evaluate the benefits of a ZIS and jumpstart their ZIS implementation. The ZIS is delivered by Microsoft partners.
The off-the-shelf ZIS enables you to rapidly develop and deploy a Zone Integration Server by using the tools and features of Microsoft ® BizTalk™ and other Microsoft .NET servers. BizTalk is Microsoft's newest .NET server designed to enable enterprise application integration and business-to-business integration based on the open, industry standards XML and HTTP.
Architecture
Third party vendors can connect their applications to one another via the Zone Integration Server by writing Agents. These agents perform the task of brokering communications between the existing application and the Zone Integration Server. The agents are also the boundary where the translation between the application's internal data format and the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) format occurs. Details about agent architectures and application vendors that have SIF Agents can be found on the SIF web site.
The figure above shows the architecture of the system and how the different components relate to one another.
Description of the Software
The server component of the software is based on BizTalk Server and uses Windows 2000. It uses a SQL Server 2000 database to store the publisher/subscriber information and MSMQ as the queuing service. It also supports HTTP as the mechanism for communication between the agents.
Zone Integration Servers for Agent Testing
If you are building an agent for your application, the following partners provide URLs to which you can send SIF Data Objects.
This enables you to quickly test the functionality of your agent without having to set up a Zone Integration Server together with publisher and subscriber applications at your site.
System Requirements
The following software required for the ZIS:
