Moodle in English: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Guy Thomas - Friday, 2 November 2007, 12:05 AM

The free GPL Facility To Moodle integration tool and documentation can now be downloaded from:

http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=992

Hope you find it useful.

*Note: Integration is a serious task and requires preparation for it to work. Don't expect to download the block install it and then have integration without the preparation work.

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Re: MIS Integration with Moodle

by Dark Nova - Thursday, 22 November 2007, 12:18 AM

Does this work with SIMS?

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Re: MIS Integration with Moodle

by Guy Thomas - Monday, 3 December 2007, 7:56 PM

No - I'm afraid it does not.
It only works with Facility CMIS. CrAPITA have a reputation for constantly changing the database design for SIMS and this would make it hard to support. Facility CMIS have designed the database better from scratch and keep it pretty much static between releases. I would encourage any school using SIMS to consider migration to Facility CMIS for the following reasons:

1) SIMs is written in VB.net - the amature programmers choice. CMIS is written in C++, the professional programmers choice.
2) SIMs database is all over the shop.
3) SIMs assessment manager is a joke - Creating an individual 'aspect' for every subject / criteria is ridiculous. CMIS's assessment model makes a lot more sense and is way more powerful.
4) SIMs SOLUS update manager is bandwidth heavy and a pain in the ass. With Facility, you either give a member of staff access to ePortal (web app) or add a shortcut to a networked exe. Everytime you upgrade the networked exe it upgrades the system for everyone - much easier to maintain.
5) SIMs was never integrated properly when I used it and routines had to be run manually to synch the data. CMIS is 100% integrated.
6) There are of course problems with CMIS but they have taken me seriously where as CrAPITA staff might as well have been a brick wall.
7) SIMs takes longer to open and has a bigger foot print - I think you need CRAY's latest super computer to run it effectively.

* I have been a bit harsh towards SIMs here but I just hate their product.

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Re: MIS Integration with Moodle

by Robert Draper - Friday, 7 December 2007, 9:42 PM

Hello Guy

I've just discovered this thread.

We use Facility at my school and would dearly love to be able to integrate Moodle with Facility but we are running Moodle 1.8.2 are you working on your block compatibility with this version? I concur with your feelings towards SIMS.

Rob

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Re: MIS Integration with Moodle

by Guy Thomas - Saturday, 8 December 2007, 1:05 AM

Yes, hopefully it should be done by Christmas.
Its not a big job (I think) to make it work with 1.8+
Basically the way groups are managed is slightly different in 1.8+ so the sql to update them needs revising.

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Re: MIS Integration with Moodle

by Robert Draper - Saturday, 8 December 2007, 5:10 AM

That's great news Guy thanks for all your efforts.

Rob

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Re: MIS Integration with Moodle

by Rob Clarke - Wednesday, 19 December 2007, 5:44 AM

Coming in late to this topic but... this is fantastic work, and really useful to our school as we're trying to convince the LEA that Moodle is the way forward and this will go a long way to doing so.

How are the plans to to update this to 1.8+ going, because if we can get a version up and running it'll go a long way to helping our cause.

Keep up the good work, and please do keep us posted with updates...

Cheers,

Rob

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Re: MIS Integration with Moodle

by Greg Jeffrey - Tuesday, 29 September 2009, 5:49 PM

Coming to this even later - it looks really exciting. We had Moodle running here pretty successfully for a couple of years. Unfortunately the powers that be abandoned ship and shifted us to a proprietry thing 'Frog' - the main reasons being the degree of integration with CMIS/EPortal that it claimed. We're now seriously looking into the possibility of moving back.
I certainly like the look of what I see in the video clips - it really makes me feel we have wasted a couple of years and a lot of money!

Can I be greedy and ask a few questions together please? Can anyone update me on:-

"Parents live view".
The statuse of "it uses mochikit for AJAX / drag drop and it may be wiser to use YAHOO YUI-" and
I can't find the "student_ad_export.rp". I assume one can work it out, but I want to avoid making silly mistakes at my end if someone has a tried and tested file to use.

Has anyone experience of using the module they would like to share?

Thanks

Greg

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Re: MIS Integration with Moodle

by Tony Dod - Tuesday, 2 February 2010, 12:10 AM

Hi All,

I know this thread has not been too active recently, but, the above link to http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=992 seems to be dead. I can no longer find any reference to this block, so, can anyone tell me where it has gone? I'd like to get it running on my test server prior to deployment on one of our live systems.

Kind regards,

Tony

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Re: Facility to Moodle integration

by Helen Foster - Friday, 19 February 2010, 9:17 PM

Hi Tony,

You should now be able to access the Facility to Moodle integration in the modules and plugins database. (The entry was updated and so needed approving before everyone could view it.) Apologies for the delay.

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Pete Dring - Sunday, 11 April 2010, 7:32 PM

Hi,

Thanks for all your work on the facility to moodle block - We've been using a moodle for our ICT department for the last few years and we've been trialling serco's skillspace VLE for the last year across the whole school but had a catalogue of problems with it and I've just persuaded the powers that be to move to a moodle VLE - so your documentation and hard work has been greatly appreciated.

Because we're starting from scratch for most departments, I've made a script that will generate courses for each year group for each subject, generate all the groups and allocate students into the correct groups and setting teacher / student roles in moodle based on a CMIS dataset. I wonder if you'd be interested in the code.

I'm hoping to develop a few features for our moodle over the next few months but I don't want to re-invent the wheel.

The forum mentioned there was an alpha version of live data view for parents - I'd be very interested in a copy of this if you know where I could access it.

Thanks for your help

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Guy Thomas - Monday, 12 April 2010, 3:54 PM

Hi Pete. I would be interested in taking a look at your code to generate courses for Moodle. I'll send you my email address and then I can send you a link to the alpha version of the parents portal.

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Robert Draper - Tuesday, 4 May 2010, 4:41 PM

We installed the facility to moodle block on Moodle Version 1.92+ and it worked very well thanks Guy.

We have upgraded to 1.98+ (Build 20100428) and seem to have a problem.

Teaching groups no longer show up when I try to add teaching groups to a course. This also applies to courses that I have previously successfully used the block with.

Cheers

Rob Draper

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Robert Draper - Wednesday, 5 May 2010, 5:01 PM

Scrap my last post it turns out that there is a problem with my IE browser as the block works fine in Firefox?

Rob Draper

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Chris Butler - Wednesday, 14 July 2010, 3:42 PM

Hi Folks

Just found this discussion, and wanted to share with you an issue i have.

I have Moodle 1.9.9+ Build 20100616

I have configured for my settings for CMIS and AD.

Copied the required files into blocks and Lib.

Had the Green Success - Facility to Moodle tables have been setup correctly

Except when i go into edit the blocks, on the drop down - the Facility to Moodle is missing.

I have tried this on two different installs

Am i missing something?

Thanks

Chris

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Robert Draper - Thursday, 2 September 2010, 10:22 PM

Hi Guy

Have you any plans to update F2M for Moodle 2?

Also are there any procedures I need to do re new academic year.

Cheers

Rob

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Guy Thomas - Wednesday, 22 September 2010, 4:45 PM

I (Guy Thomas) will no longer be maintaining this project as I am leaving my current Moodle role and will not have the time to continue with enhancements, bug fixes or support.

I am handing the development over to Marc Coyles:

http://moodle.org/user/view.php?id=861594&course=1

Thank you to everyone who has used this block and has given me feedback.

Guy

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Pete Dring - Wednesday, 22 September 2010, 9:48 PM

Thanks Guy - this block has been extremely useful for our VLE - thanks for all your hard work!

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Dean Lewis - Monday, 13 December 2010, 9:40 PM

Anybody using or upgraded to Moodle 2.0 with this block installed? Is it compatible?

Thanks,

Dean

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Barrie Almond - Tuesday, 21 December 2010, 12:58 AM

Unfortunately neither this nor the alpha version of the parents live view seem to be compatible seem to be Moodle 2 compatible right now.

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Dean Lewis - Tuesday, 4 January 2011, 7:24 PM

Thanks for the reply. In light of this then; does anybody know if development is on-going to port this block to 2.0 or is it just being maintained as it is?

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Chris Butler - Tuesday, 18 January 2011, 4:46 PM

Hi Guys

Is possible for me to get a copy of the parents access live view?

Cheers

Chris

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Rene Schaetzl - Friday, 27 May 2011, 10:45 PM

Dean,

the current version is definitely not running on 2.0 as it uses deprecated functions for moodle db access etc.

I've spend a bit of time on it and 'ported' that over myself. Apart from the parent bit (which we don't use).

It seems to work so far.

facility_to_moodle2.tar.bz2

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Allan Kealey - Thursday, 9 June 2011, 8:15 PM

I have just tried to instaff facility_to_moodle2 and get an error.

Debug info: Missing main block class file.

Stack trace:

line 620 of \lib\upgradelib.php: plugin_defective_exception thrown
line 267 of \lib\upgradelib.php: call to upgrade_plugins_blocks()
line 1425 of \lib\upgradelib.php: call to upgrade_plugins()
line 311 of \admin\index.php: call to upgrade_noncore()

Any ideas? It is the latest build of Moodle 2

Thanks for the good work

Allan

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Allan Kealey - Thursday, 16 June 2011, 10:46 PM

I have solved the installation problemm, rename the folder to facility_to_moodle but now it is not showing in the add blocks drop down? Any ideas

Allan

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Dean Lewis - Thursday, 9 June 2011, 9:31 PM

Thanks Rene,

I shall install and have a look at this when I get chance. It also may be useful for me to provide some feedback.

Dean.

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Facility To Moodle integration

by Greg Jeffrey - Monday, 31 January 2011, 10:28 PM

Hi Marc, As you are doubltless aware CMIS/ePortal are in the process of moving to their new entirely web-based replacement Progresso. Have you any thoughts on this because it looks on the face of it as if they are going to break our student import, and that would be a major problem for us.
Greg

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration

by Dean Lewis - Wednesday, 16 February 2011, 8:09 PM

It seems that an API will be provided for Progresso so in theory it shouldn't be quite as hard to build a replacement module.

Dean.

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration

by Greg Jeffrey - Wednesday, 16 February 2011, 9:09 PM

Hey, did you just volunteer there Dean?

There are a few of us here who would be really grateful!

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration

by Paul Gardner - Thursday, 28 April 2011, 10:03 PM

Hi there,

I know that this has already been answered but I was wondering if there had been any updates. My school uses SIMS and the tech guys say that the facility to moodle is not possible with SIMS. Short of a whole-school restructure is there anything you could suggest to build a bridge between SIMS and 'facility to MOODLE'.

This is a great forum by the way, really helpful!

Paul Gardner

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration

by Neil Spurgeon - Thursday, 28 April 2011, 11:56 PM

Lots of schools of course do use SIMs and Capita endlessly make promises about what they will be doing and what will come out of their research and development activities year on year. Many of these, of course, never materialise. Personally in every orgaisation in which I have been involved we have always used an overnight 'warehouse' of .csv files with relatively basic integration using simple scripting of the upload new users model into Moodle. It works and the fields are already available in SIMs although they need renaming in the warehouse to meet Moodle upload requirements

Rather than wishing for the moon I would challenge your ICT teacher(s) and their best three or four script jokey students to write what you need and then use it 'as is' rather than wait for Capita to do anything interesting - you'll have a long beard and grey hair before it comes to fruition from them. Oh and mark the kids not on the results but on the standard of the documentation, that way you will have a product that will still be in use long after the winning pupil leaves !! OK I'm a pragmatist - something wrong with pragmatism?

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration

by Marc Coyles - Tuesday, 24 January 2012, 7:28 PM

Hi Greg - yep, a rewrite will be required for Progresso support, which I fully intend to do... once we get Progresso installed / details of the API.

In the meantime, I have rewritten for Moodle 2.2+ but this isn't yet ready for release. The "Import Teaching Group" function doesn't work as it did previously, in that it creates the correct groups with members within the course, but doesn't enrol the members on the course... a tad odd. Not used to how Moodle 2.2 handles this.

Current theory is to get the block to auto-create yeargroup or KS based cohorts, and associated categories. Courses then get created within those categories, with the associated cohort enrolled to all courses within that category. The groupings would then work as expected.

Kind of need input from the community as to whether this is the best way to go about this part. Can provide the updated code as it currently stands for testing - the Group Import feature is the only part that doesn't fully work...

Those asking about the Parents Data View block - that was never handed over to me to maintain I'm afraid... altho I will be rewriting that next (once I've gotten these last issues with Fac-2-Moodle resolved).

Anyone wanting to assist with the final bits, feel free to drop me a line.

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration

by Marc Coyles - Wednesday, 25 January 2012, 6:48 PM

Scratch that...! Import Teaching Group functions now working perfectly as intended / expected.

Just a few minor issues to resolve now before the 2.2 version of the block is ready...

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration

by David Friday - Thursday, 9 February 2012, 11:01 PM

Hi Marc,

Thank-you for your product so far.

We are a poineer for Progresso and about to go live, have you received a go-live-date? what kind of time frame do you think you will need to create the "progresso to Moodle" plugin?

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration

by Marc Coyles - Thursday, 16 February 2012, 8:40 PM

I've been informed that we should be getting it installed over summer, and will run both Progresso and Facility in parallel for a while. How long it takes to redevelop to support Progresso I can't say until I've seen what I'm dealing with in terms of Progresso's Web Services APIs etc.

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Andy Gibson - Tuesday, 11 October 2011, 5:34 PM

Could anyone please tell me how you get the Staff transfer to work correctly? I know that the F2M block is looking to match the staff code to AD, but which field to which? I would like to try and get this running as soon as I can if possible, and I think/hope this is my final stumbling block...

Thanks very much in advance

Andy Gibson
St Mary's Catholic High School
Chesterfield

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by nathan bingham - Thursday, 20 October 2011, 4:48 PM

Hi Andy

We use the Facility to Moodle at Notre Dame Sheffield. Due to the way facility is set up we don't use the transfer staff bit. To get staff into Moodle you could export them from Active Directory and then upload them using the bulk upload user option.

Hope this is useful? Feel free to get in touch.

Nathan

Notre Dame High School

Sheffield (upt'road)

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Marc Coyles - Tuesday, 24 January 2012, 7:34 PM

Andy - in config_facility_to_moodle.php you should have:

$ftm_cfg->staffLDAPMatchField='description'; // active directory field used to match

ie: Put staffcode from facility into AD "description" field, and it should then find and transfer staff.

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Allan Kealey - Friday, 27 January 2012, 6:14 PM

I am glad to see this project is still alive. Would it be possible to get a copy of the latest version as I was a big fan of the version that ran on 1.9 and it is sadly missed on 2.2. I would be a willing tester

Allan

Tibshelf (Also near Sheffield)

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Roy Williams - Wednesday, 7 December 2011, 6:37 PM

Hi their been trying to get the block working over the last week not sure if i am just getting it total wrong.

I am running

Windows 2008 r2 server

SQl 2008 IIS PHP 5.3.8 non tread safe

Moodle 1.9.15+ build 20111201

installed the latest version on the facility to moodle block

creates tables

When i run student import I get

Initialising connections...

Attempting to connect to Facility database CMIS_ADMIN

Connection to Facility database successful.

Student transfer progress

Transferring BDN - bdn name: year 7

Attempting to connect to LDAP server LDAP connection OK.

Connected to LDAP in active directory mode LDAP bind successful.

Results returned=126

Attempting transfer of student: 11676 Lauren Aldridge - login = 11aldlau - last logged in = 2011-12-01 011676

Transfer type = INSERT

Transfer completed successfully.

Attempting transfer of student: 11695 Katy Allsworth - login = 11allkat - last logged in = 2011-12-06 011695

Transfer type = INSERT

Transfer completed successfully.

But when i go to browes list of user their are no entres for students also when i look at the sql mbl_user table their are no student entres, and no entres in mdl_f2m_group_history, mbl_f2m_group_linker

Help Please Drive me nuts

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Andy Gibson - Friday, 16 December 2011, 8:26 PM

Is it possible for me to get hold of a copy of the Parents Live View Alpha? I would like to be able to add additional information into Moodle from Facility.

Thanks in advance!

Andy

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Marc Coyles - Thursday, 16 February 2012, 9:04 PM

Andy - drop me a line...

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by llywelyn morgan - Saturday, 24 March 2012, 11:03 PM

sorry if i appear impatient but what's the latest on the 2.2 release? never got round to trying it on 1.9 so very eager to see how well it works, especially the ability to give parents access to student grades without having to set up parent users manually.

thanks

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Re: Facility To Moodle integration (was Re: MIS Integration with Moodle)

by Will Pandle - Thursday, 21 June 2012, 10:47 PM

hey guys

im starting to play with this plugin does anyone know why i would get this error>

Facility To Moodle - D:\App/lib/gtlib_yui

THanks

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