There was a move in the 1990’s towards fully integrated suites of products for the enterprise. In the learning world this may have included learning management, learning content management, performance management and content authoring products from a single vendor such as Sumtotal Systems. Or you might have customer relationship management, financial management and human capital management from a single vendor such as Oracle.

But it’s a rare sight today to find a business replacing an entire suite of products, for a number of reasons including not just financial constraints but also greater system interoperability using web services and open architectures. The more forward thinking system vendors have been busy creating open interfaces to their products, called application programming interfaces, or APIs. This allows the transfer of data to and from systems as needed. The advent of web services in the last decade has made this all the easier.

Making these disparate systems talk to each other is called System Integration. At Kineo Open Source we have a team of technicians who have been integrating Moodle LMS with a range of systems including HR databases, website content management systems (CMS) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Our customers are largely comprised of corporate and government organisations, and as an example of how the Moodle LMS is being integrated within these organisations we’ve outlined some of the SI projects we have undertaken:

• Moodle and Skillport LMS integration for a global telecoms company which was running Skillport in one region and Moodle in other regions, but required a central user database that contained up to date progress information from both systems.
• Moodle and SugarCRM for a major engineering firm who used the CRM system to manage employees across their nationwide dealership network and the LMS to deliver training to those employees.
• Moodle and Joomla CMS for a global telecoms organisation using a Joomla website as the front-end of their training platform and Moodle for the launching and tracking of SCORM compliant elearning courses, in a seamless user experience.
• Moodle and SAP for a number of local councils, pulling user records from the SAP system and passing LMS tracking data back so the master training records could be updated accordingly.
• Moodle and HR.Net for a major City law firm and a global engineering company, for setting up users in the LMS and passing tracking data back, and also complementing HR.Net’s classroom booking features with some related event calendar features from Moodle.
• Moodle and Vyre Unify CMS for a professional members body in which the Unify website was the main user interface, pulling course menu information from Moodle using SOAP web services and launching Moodle courses within an iframe in the Unify website with all styles inherited from the website for a seamless user experience, so the user never left the website.
• Moodle and Sharepoint for a central government organisation where content was stored in Sharepoint and launched via Moodle using Sharepoint Web Parts.
• Several integrations with bespoke intranet applications at a number of large global retail enterprises.

From engaging in such a variety of System Integration projects we come across the whole gamut of approaches to integration from commercial software vendors. There are some vendors who fully embrace the concept of open architectures and in doing so are clearly mining a rich seam in new business as relationships are forged with new prospects and partners. There are of course still some companies who seem determined to remain closed to the outside world, charging a fortune in consultancy costs to engage in basic custom development work in order to allow other systems to access their data, a blinkered view indeed.

In many cases, open source has been a factor in forcing the hand of commercial vendors to open up their interfaces. It seems like this may be the most effective way for commercial vendors to react to the disruptive influence of open source in software markets. Sharepoint is a great example of a commercial product that has opened up. The core Sharepoint product is as closed-source as ever, however there are over 3,000 API’s available to programmers to enable them to extend the product in new and unforeseen ways by creating services, add-ons and integrated solutions. As noted on CMS Wire, this has resulted in a vibrant ecosystem and community to rival that of any open source product, a shrewd move on the part of Microsoft.

We believe that vendors who don’t open up their software will be consigned to dustbin of history. Open source is becoming more prevalent in the enterprise applications market and threatened vendors are now realising that by offering good APIs they can grow vibrant developer and user communities that achieve similar levels of product innovation that open source has demonstrated so successfully. The success of products like Sharepoint and Jira will become more widely replicated in the years ahead. In the 21st Century, open API means open for business.