EVALUATION OF UTILIZING SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE AS A SUITABLE SOLUTION TO ALIGN UNIVERSITY MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

To help universities achieve their goals, it is important to align managerial
functionalities side by side with educational aspects. Universities consume University
Management Information Systems (UMIS) to handle managerial aspects as they do
with Learning Management Systems (LMS) to achieve learning objectives. UMIS
advances LMS by decades and has reached stable and mature consistency level. LMS
is the newly acquired solution in Universities; compared to UMIS, and so adopting
LMSs in universities can be achieved via three different deployment approaches. First
approach believes in LMS ability to replace UMIS and performing its functionalities.
Second approach presents the idea of extending UMIS to include LMS functionalities.
Third approach arises from the shortages of the two proposed approaches and
present integration between both as the appropriate deployment approach. Service
Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a design pattern that can be used as a suitable
architectural solution to align UMIS and LMS. SOA can be utilized in universities to
overcome some of information systems‘ challenges like the integration between
UMIS and LMS.
This paper presents the current situation at Mansoura University; Egypt, presents
integration as the most suitable solution, and evaluates three different
implementation techniques: Dynamic Query, Stored Procedure, and Web services.
Evaluation concludes that though SOA enhanced many different aspects of both UMIS
and LMS; and consequently university overall. It is not recommended to adopt SOA
via Web services as the building unit of the system, but as the interdisciplinary
interface between systems.