© 2018 Capita Business Services Ltd. All rights reserved.
Capita Education Software Solutions is a trading name of Capita Business Services Ltd. Our Registered office is 30 Berners Street, London, W1T 3LR and our registered number is 02299747. Further information about Capita plc can be found in our legal statement.
Simplified Overview of SIMS Integration
In most cases, to set up an integration with SIMS you will need an IT professional to create a Windows application for installation on the SIMS SQL server. IT professionals typically write the application using Microsoft Visual Studio and .Net Framework 4.7.2.
You need to have signed a SIMS Technical Integrator contract before you (or an IT professional working on your behalf) create and supply an application for integration.
You can also integrate via an aggregator. These are SIMS Technical Integrators who supply integration as a service to third parties like you. However, any attempt to integrate with SIMS without a SIMS Technical Integrator in the chain is likely to be in breach of our licensing agreement(s).
Please contact us outlining what you would need from SIMS. Our Partner Integration Manager will explain integration costs during the first engagement.
Our Partner Management Team will help a third party like you to create your own integration with SIMS. However, all the programming will have to be done by you or developers that work with you. SIMS does not currently supply development services to third parties.
Our website, www.sims-partners.com, provides information and examples to help you understand what is needed to use our APIs (APIs allow different software programs to communicate with SIMS). We have guidance and sample code for many of our APIs. However, because SIMS is vast and has many different APIs, we don't have pre-made documentation for all of them. If you need added assistance, our team of development support engineers is available to help.
Lead times can vary widely. A simple integration – for example, one that posts a list of pupil surname, forename, year and registration form for on-roll students to an existing endpoint - could be done by refactoring sample code within a few hours. Writing a full integration, say with an ePayment engine to our dinner money module, might take many weeks for a team of developers.
Read-only integrations, where information flows from SIMS to your system, are simple. To keep SIMS running efficiently, the data extracts typically occur once an hour or once a day.
A write-back integration, where your system updates SIMS, can also be straight forward, for example if your system updates attendance records.
However, editing an address in SIMS can be complex because there are often multiple people at the address who may need to be contacted to figure out the exact change needed.
You should also try to make your data exchange with SIMS as efficient as is practical to avoid impacting the day to day use of SIMS.
Please contact us so that we can guide on the complexity of the challenge. We can also advise if there are alternative ways to achieve your aim. We look forward to hearing from you.