[seul-edu] SIF's Zone Integration Server(

[Eric Sandeen <sandeen@jump.net>]

I was looking at the draft Schools Interoperability Framework
(www.schoolsinterop.org) and it seems that they've made a lot of
progress, and gained a lot of momentum.

One of the features of their system is a "Zone Integration Server" (ZIS)
which manages messages and requests to and from the various
SIF-compatible clients attached to it (gradebooks, rosters, report card
programs, etc.)

Since Microsoft is a major force behind SIF, they have actually writte a
ZIS for NT, SQL, and MSMQ(?) - see
http://www.microsoft.com/education/partneropp/download.asp

The interesting thing is that the C++ source is available, and the
license is actually fairly liberal.  Liberal enough, I think, that a
port to Linux would be within the terms of the license. 
(http://www.microsoft.com/education/partneropp/eula.asp)

I'll admit right now that I don't have the necessary programming chops,
but I'm wondering how hard it would be to port this to a Linux/MySQL
environment - that'd be a heck of a press release for the SEUL-Edu
group.

The download doesn't seem to work if you don't have IE (go figure) so
hopefully Bill will forgive me if I just post the direct link here: 
http://download.microsoft.com/download/win2000srv/ZIS/1.0/NT45/EN-US/ZIS-v1.exe

-Eric