I have asked someone to post details of the interchange format on our web site http://support.capitaes.co.uk/.  I am expecting it to be in the "Sticky Items" section.

We have reached the final stages of producing the interface documentation and I expect it to be published on our public site by the start of next week. SIMS.CO.UK

• As exams approach it might be suitable to give Y9 students access to Y8 and Y7 courses.
• Access to activities (e.g. forums) and resources can (and arguably should) be provided for all the people studying a subject, such as a whole year group, rather than to several discrete groups whose only reason for existence is traditional timetable and classroom constraints.

I don't think that we are going to get exactly what were after without paying Capita for the licence. From what i understand Capita licence a program to talk to sims and would proberbly have to licence a moodle module which due to the cost would end up no being open source.

Due to the amount of schools that use it, it maybe worth getting together and trying to solve this but after paying for developers to it could work out quite expensive.

• Their reporting interface that can output data from SIMS. This can be used by any SIMS user given access. It is SIMS> only. This can provide semi automated interoperability at least read out if scheduled reports are collected and munged by scripts.
  
• Their SDK which essentially gives you better access to reporting by exposing the key ID fields of tables. This needs to be sanctioned by the suppoort service for your SIMS installation probably your Local Authority and if they support it there should be no cost. I think it may allow some form of write > SIMS as well as output SIMS > but that may only be into the assessment module? I do recall doing CSV import into assessment manager but it often required careful setup and manual intervention to sort out records that didn't quite match student records.
  
• Their IMS Enterprise interface as mentioned by Phil Neal above. This requires web services and has a data model that provides student and teacher data out of SIMS. I believe there is limited exposure of assessment and attendance data. As for the SDK it requires support from your support services for SIMS and Capita require you to register the use of this. I don't know where you get the web services to talk and listen? Anyone? Is this what the MINTED project does? This is SIMS > only.
  
• Capita licence their Business Objects which are a set of windows dlls that are required on the client accessing the SIMS server which could include the Moodle server if on Windows. this is what requires the large annual support agreement I believe. It is the recommended way to write > SIMS as well as the best way to get data out. This is because it rovides an api that Capita will continue to support. It allows youi to expand the SIMS database too. I believe TASC use it for their PARS extensions to SIMS.
• Capita are involved in the UK SIF group and are writing agents to provide write > SIMS and read i.e. SIMS >. They use this for their Partnership Xchange server which is a SIF ZIS. There is a developing SIF data model for the UK and I believe the DCSF may soon be announcing a statement of intent about SIF being the way forward for data interoperability for MIS and Learning Platforms and other uk educational databases. Capita have expressed concern about the development costs required and that data will be lost if temporal data is not linked with SIF data objects particularly for attendance and assessment data. I suspect some MIS suppliers may need to extend their database to accomodate this kind of data too.
• Capita have their dot net SIMS Learning Gateway that provides a provisioning service for creating Active Directory Accounts and an apsx application layer and web parts to give a view onto a limited set of SIMS data modules. Mostly read only but their is some write back into assessment and pupil reporting modules. This isn't true data interoperability bar the provisioning of accounts as the data doesn't come out into the dot net VLE database so you can't "mix" the data except by view.
• Capita do not support direct access to the MS SQL database though read only shouldn't be a problem any write back is definitely not a good idea becuase of the validation issues and because I don't think there is any normalisation either.