(1070) TOWARDS THE DEVELOPMENT OF MIDDLEWARE ARCHITECTURE, INTEROPERABILITY OF UNIVERSITY’S INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTEGRATING ONLINE LEARNING PLATFORMS

摘要

Today, we cannot imagine a software that can meet all the needs expressed by a company. An Information System (IS) can be an assembly of independent applications, each of which is designed to meet a specific need. In order for the IT department to meet the needs of the company, it tries to take the best customer relationship management (CRM) solution, the best Enterprise Resource Planning Software (ERP) and the best Document Electronic Management solution (EDM) and then integrates them into its IS. This problem is also posed in the Higher Education sector. Following a study carried out on Moroccan institutions organized on several campuses, it was found that most of them bring together several software (paying or open source) in the form of heterogeneous solutions to set up their University Information Systems (UIS) in order to meet their specific learning management needs. This configuration of the UIS causes a desynchronization of all the data between the applications. This will push users to enter the same information several times in different applications, and this could be a source of many errors. In order to give learners, teachers and administrative users a better use of the UIS and avoid the obligation to re-enter the same data, the unavailability of data in a manipulated application, the inconsistency of the data due to non-replication caused by changes made on one application and not on the others, it is necessary to integrate and flexibly exchange information between all UIS applications. Our contribution tries to propose a middleware architecture, in the form of a platform of integration of applications in a UIS. It allows heterogeneous applications to manage their exchanges while ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, speed of transfer and authenticity of the data. For example, it allows an application to consult and / or update data from another application. To achieve this objective, we have performed: A study of technologies in the field of application integration. A comparative analysis between the different application integration platforms from the point-topoint architecture to the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) architecture by passing the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). An in-depth study on the use of data exchanges between heterogeneous applications in terms of confidentiality, integrity, speed of transfer and authenticity. The proposed middleware solution allows for a considerable improvement in the governance of academic institutions by adopting an ESB integration architecture at the various campuses of the institution. This change in the architecture of the IS ensures that: The exchange of information between the various campuses and the headquarters is instant and safe; The data is secured across the bus; The transfer of data is fast across the bus; The information is presented in standardized form, and can be understood with any application of the establishment; The information is entered once by UIS users.