• What is the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF Association)?
  
  
• Why was the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF Association) started?
  
  
• How will schools and districts benefit from the SIF Association?
  
  
• How does a school or district get involved?
  
  
• I´m a Superintendent, what does the SIF Association mean to me?
  
  
• I´m a teacher, what does SIF and the SIF Association mean to me?
  
  
• How does SIF work?
  
  
• What are the SIF Association Work Groups?
  
  
• What is the difference between a voting membership and a non-voting membership?
  
  
• Will this become a product that gets sold in the future?
  
  
• What is SIF Certification?
  
  
• Why does SIF Certification matter?
  
  
• What is the SIF Specification?
  
  
• What technology is the specification based on?
  
  
• What do all those numbers and letters following the Specification mean?
  
  
• Will SIF be a worldwide specification?
  
  
• How can I tell if a company is involved in the SIF Association?
  
  

The Schools Interoperability Framework Association (SIF Association) is a non-profit organization that brings together vendors, government agencies, state departments of education, and other industry leaders to develop a specification ensuring that pK12 instructional and administrative software applications can share information seamlessly. The SIF Association or SIF is not a product but rather an industry-supported technical blueprint that will enable diverse applications to interact and share data.

When building a software program, each company develops its own way of organizing and distributing information. This works well within each software program, but it can make it difficult for software programs from different companies to work together and to share data. This lack of data sharing--and lack of interoperability—often means that different parts of the same school or district have to re-enter the same data many times. This repetition not only takes a great deal of staff time, but it also makes maintaining consistent data across different programs difficult. Since, in the past, there was no automatic way to update data, a new phone number that was updated in the office might not be updated in the cafeteria for days or weeks—if at all. 

By bringing together over 150 leading software developers--along with interested school districts, regional education agencies and other concerned organizations--the SIF Association has developed a set of common definitions for school data and a set of rules for how this data can be shared. This combination of common definitions and messaging rules--documented in the SIF Specification-- makes it possible for software applications from different vendors to share data and helps eliminate both redundant data entry and data inconsistency.

With the Schools Interoperability Framework, educators can select the best-of-breed software for their schools’ information technology infrastructures.  They can be confident that an industry-supported technical blueprint for pK-12 software ensures that the diverse instructional and administrative software applications will work seamlessly together now and in the future.

The goal of SIF and the SIF Association is to help educators maximize their instructional and administrative software investments and use staff and faculty time more efficiently. Educators consistently lament the fact that financial management, administrative, library, transportation routing, instructional management and cafeteria applications do not work together. Through the SIF Association, the education software industry is working to resolve the perplexing challenge of interoperability in pK-12 schools.

Accessing data from these operational systems makes it easier for schools and districts to generate reports and help educators analyze data—allowing for faster and more accurate decision-making.  The SIF Association also makes it easier for districts to convey information to state and federal departments of education quickly and accurately. Educators who have implemented SIF in their school districts have found that it:

• enhances product functionality  
• allows for sharing data without incurring expensive customer development costs
• provides best-of-breed solutions to customers easily and seamlessly
• reduces redundancy of data entry
• produces reports with data from multiple vendor companies
• ensures that products will work together

   

• Join SIFA and sit on work groups. Then, influence and vote on specifications.  
• Require SIF Certified products in your RFPs and buy process.
• Stay abreast of which companies are developing products to be SIF Certified.

   

As a Superintendent, your role as both the key instructional leader and chief of operations places you in a unique and demanding role, unlike almost any other in business today. Your twin responsibilities for educating children and managing the staff and resources necessary to accomplish that goal are particularly challenging in the face of technological innovation, increased state and federal accountability and municipal funding cycles. Your need for accurate, integrated data to make informed and fiscally responsible decisions has never been greater. Implementing software programs that utilize SIF can provide you with a flexible and robust technological infrastructure to help you meet these demands.

Depending upon the number of SIF Certified applications installed at your site, the SIF Association´s impact on your school or district may include: saving time for instructional staff; streamlining administrative tasks; enabling more efficient allocations of support staff; and more effective facilities planning and enrollment forecasting. SIF can provide your teaching staff with the confidence that the data they have access to--from class lists with parent/guardian address and phone numbers, to grade reports and bus schedules--is the most up- to-date available in the system. The savings in time and effort necessary to register a new student in the library or cafeteria not only help a busy staff and their teaching schedules, but it helps the new student feel a part of the entire school community from their very first day.  The ability to share data among instructional, administrative and support software applications makes it possible to be more accurate with both short- and long-term planning, including better forecasting student enrollments to avoid overcrowding or to plan for new construction. The SIF Association and SIF Certified software applications can give you and your staff access to the type, quality and timeliness of data that will help you better foster, develop and manage the personnel and resources to nurture and educate our children for tomorrow.

 For teachers, the impact of SIF in your school or district could be significant. SIF and the SIF Association´s ultimate goal is to provide all school and district personnel with appropriate access to the most correct and timely data available. If your district implements SIF-Certified software applications, the first benefit you may encounter is the confidence in knowing that the data you have access to, --from class lists with parent/guardian address and phone numbers, to grade reports and bus schedules--is the most up-to-date available in the system. Similarly, if you are now responsible for any sort of data entry, such as entering students in an Instructional Management System or a grade book program, you may find that all of this data entry has already been accomplished by the SIF Certified software, preserving your time for planning and direct instruction.

These initial benefits of data accuracy and data streamlining will be the most apparent and the ones that will affect you most directly. The savings in time and effort necessary to, register a new student in the library or cafeteria will also be forthcoming.   These changes not only help with your busy schedule, but they also help the new student feel a part of the entire school from his or her first day. Ultimately, the ability to share data among instructional, administrative and support software applications will make it possible to be more accurate with both short- and long-term planning.  Because data is more accessible and more easily analyzed, it may be possible to better forecast student enrollments to avoid overcrowding or to plan for new construction.  You may never have to deal with the “nuts and bolts” of implementing SIF in your school or district, but the impact on your ability to be an informed and effective teacher will be both direct and substantial.

There are two types of the SIF Association work groups: technical and support. School members are asked to serve on both. The technical work groups are designated by school function. They include assessment, instructional services, professional development, data warehousing, food services, grade book, HR/finance, information management, infrastructure, library automation, student information services, and transportation. The support task force and committees are designed to assist the groups served by the SIF Association. These include certification testing, implementation, and marketing.

There are two levels of school and district memberships and you may choose between them when joining SIFA.  Voting membership entitles you to have a voice and vote on the SIF Specification, members of the Board of Directors, Technical Board at-Large positions and other issues concerning the Association.  Non-voting memberships enjoy all of the privileges of members (including serving on Work Groups, Committees and Task Forces) but they cannot vote. 

The SIF Certification Program is a formal program undertaken by SIFA to confirm that software programs adhere to the rules and definitions of the SIF Implementation Specification. SIFA has contracted a well-respected international certification organization to serve as the SIF Certification Authority. The SIF Certification Program involves a series of formal tests which validate that software applications properly implement the SIF specification. A software program which successfully completes the program will be able to display the “SIF Certified” logo on its package, website and in promotional literature. The SIF Certified logo is your indication that this particular version of the software program has been tested and certified to properly communicate and share information with other SIF Certified software programs.

It is important to note that software programs will be Certified only to a particular release of the SIF Specification. The particular release of the specification will be indicated on the logo, for example, the words: "SIF Certified, Version 1.1", indicate that this version of the software program is Certified with SIF Specification Version 1.1. In completing the Certification Program, each company must complete a Conformance Statement Questionnaire that indicates which SIF data and messages the company’s application supports. The application will then be tested against this questionnaire to confirm the company’s statements. The completed questionnaire will be available on the certification authority’s website for you to review. In order to continue to use the SIF Certified logo, each company must support a “conformance guarantee” which states that they will continue to keep their application in conformance with the specification throughout the duration of their certification period. For more information, please visit http://certification.sifinfo.org

The SIF specification is based on the W3C endorsed standard Extensible Markup Language (XML). It defines common data formats and high-level rules of interaction and architecture, and is not linked to a particular operating system or platform. 

Because the development of the SIF Specification is an evolving process, it is necessary to indicate to vendors and the general public when changes have been made to the specification. SIFA has created a regular process to make changes and implemented a numbering scheme to reflect those changes. For example, the current release of the SIF Specification is 1.5r1. The first number in front of the period (1) is the number of the major release, the number just after period (5) indicates the minor release version and the r1 indicates that this is a ´revision´ or ´fix´ version. A ´revision´ or ´fix´ number indicates that there have been some small text changes to the documentation, but no other changes have been made since the last release. Making a substantial change to the messaging rules or data definitions would constitute a Major release and would change the number in front of the period such as: 2.0. A change in the status of a data object, for example, would trigger a minor release and be written like: 2.1. SIFA members are currently working on Specification version 2.0. To summarize:

• Major versions address those things that can change the ways in which applications work together.  
• Minor versions address the status of data objects but not how the applications function.    
• Fix versions address unanticipated minor items or items that can be included without changing the status of a data object.

Anything that happens in a Fix release is included in the next Minor release and any Minor changes are included in the next Major release. Fix and Minor releases are stops on the way to the next major release.  All releases of the specification: are scheduled.

There are more than 300 leading education software vendors and customers involved SIFA.  They can be involved in two different ways: 
 

1.       SIFA Member. This means that the company/organization has paid their SIFA dues and is involved in the working groups writing the specifications.  Please note, any company may be a member of SIFA, but that does not necessarily mean that any of their products are SIF Certified.  

2.       SIF Certified. This means that company’s product have met SIF criteria and passed certification testing. All products may be tested for certification. For the up-to-date list of certified applications, visit Certification Register.

For a complete listing of SIFA Vendor Members visit our online directory.