How do you ensure all your applications do what they say they will?
About the SIF Certification Program
The A4L Community established the SIF Certification Program to help ensure that data is successfully transferred between applications and that the transferred data successfully resides in all sharing applications, by using the SIF Specifications – “enter once and use many times”! The SIF Certification Program is a voluntary program, and is open to any ‘Premium’ member of the A4L Community. To find out more about membership, please click here.
Several documents support any solution provider considering obtaining SIF Certification for their product:
SIF CERTIFICATION GUIDES
The SIF Certification Guides provide an overview of the certification processes, including ‘checklists’ to assist and should be referred to first.
SIF CERTIFICATION POLICY DOCUMENTS
These documents detail the policies governing the Program. They define what products can be certified, what it means to be certified, and the process for achieving and maintaining certification. Buyers intending to procure SIF-certified products will also find this document useful for understanding what they may expect from such a certified product.
SIF CERTIFICATION AGREEMENT & TRADEMARK LICENCE AGREEMENT
Taken together, the SIF Certification Agreement and the Trademark License Agreement (TMLA) constitute the set of requirements and obligations for achieving certification.
The Certification Program benefits both customers and vendors by:
- Providing end users an assurance of a high level of conformance and interoperability between SIF-certified products.
- Reducing the vendor’s costs and risks involved with getting a product certified.
- Requiring that products remain conformant throughout its registration and that any non-conformance will be promptly fixed.
What next?
Find out what products are Certified
If you are interested in finding out what products are currently SIF Certified and available in the educational marketplace, please visit the SIF Certification Registry.
Participate in the SIF Certification Program
If you are interested in participating in the SIF Certification Program, please review the relevant Guide to the SIF Certification Program document which is designed to answer the basic questions of an applicant and walk you through the certification process.
A detailed description of each process step can be found in the relevant Guide to the SIF Certification Program document, ‘Checklists’ section.
Should you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact John Lovell, Technology Director, or Penny Murray, Community Director.
SIF Certification Program: documentation
SIF 2 Certification Program
*The SIF 2 Certification Program and associated documentation are currently unavailable. Going forward it will support SIF Data Model Specification (NA) 2.7*
Guide to SIF 2 Certification Program
SIF 2 Enabled Product Standard
Zone Integration Server 2.0r1 Product Standard
SIF Test Harness User Manual: SIF 2 Enabled Applications
Unity Certification Program
*IN DEVELOPMENT*
NOTES:
Guide to the SIF 2 Certification Program: Section 4 of the guide provides checklists to help you through the SIF Certification Program. Vendors have the ability to test the mandatory features as defined in the SIF Implementation Specification and to document support for any optional/conditional features in the associated conformance statement. The SIF 2 Certification product standard is intended for SIF-enabled applications that send data per a given SIF Implementation Specification in the SIF 2 lifecycle. All programs support the processing of events, requests and responses from the relevant SIF Implementation Specification in the SIF 2 release cycle. This maximizes interoperability as the A4L Community continues to follow its membership-driven release cycle for the specification.
Guide to the SIF 3 Certification Program: Released in October 2014, the SIF 3 Certification Program offers the latest quality assurance for all SIF 3 products. An exciting aspect of the new SIF 3 Certification Program is the strong, flexible, and scalable foundation that it is built on. From a simplified and streamlined Conformance Statement Questionnaire (CSQ) that will enable better reporting to the scriptable Test Sessions, we are truly walking through a door that will enable innovation for years to come! The SIF 3 API and upgraded tools and policies all make this release a great step forward for the educational market which not only adds some quality control to marketplace products but also helps clarify expectations between education software providers and their school, district, and state clients.