Web Services available for ITM

Mission Control is delighted to announce two Web Services for ITM are now available to all user organisations, allowing direct integration with your existing custom applications and websites.

What are web services?
For technical users, the full definition is here. For the rest of us - a web service is a way for a computer program to connect to and use a small part of another computer program, over the internet. An example would be a travel company website - it might use a web service provided by an airline to find out what flights are available for a given date, origin and destination. The travel company website could then display this information to it's visitors.

A computer program or website that makes use of a web service is known as a 'consumer' or 'requestor', and the program or website that offers the service is often called the 'provider'.

What web services are available for ITM?
Released in May 2008, the first web service for ITM is called EventsForCalendarByDateRange. It provides a list of events between two specified dates. The consumer can specify which Calendar to get the events for. So for example, if you have one calendar set up within ITM (Administration menu, Calendar Administration) for each of the 5 offices in your organisation, then each of these 5 calendars can be accessed by your web service consumer, you just need to know the ID number for the calendar.

The Alberta Orienteering Association is already making use of this web service so they can display event information directly on their website. Visitors to their site can then click a link, and navigate directly to the relevant public page on the ITM public calendar in order to register.

Released in July 2009, the second web service is called AuthenticateUser, which allows your other applications and websites to make use of user credentials managed in ITM. This makes it easier for your users - who only have to remember one set of user names and passwords.

What other web services are possible?
Mission Control will be happy to talk to you about any needs you have to integrate with your existing applications or systems. We will build secure and reliable web services to meet the needs of our clients as requests are made.

A couple of examples of what could be possible:

Your Human Resources program connects to ITM to get students latest contact information
Your Human Resources program connects to ITM to provide contact information for students and instructors
Your website connects to ITM to get syllabus information for display - for example course descriptions.
Your email system could connect to ITM to get a list of attendees for each event coming up, so your staff can write to them easily
Your application for allocating tasks to people could connect to ITM to find out who has completed a particular qualification

Web Service security
Each web service that ITM provides requires a unique login name and unique access key for consumers to be able to use the service. Mission Control strictly limits the access each consumer has to different areas of the data stored in ITM.
For web services where it is appropriate, we have introduced IP Address filters, to ensure only accepted webservers are calling the services. In addition, where sensitive information is being transmitted, we have applied strong encryption methods to ensure the privacy and integrity of the data.

Related Articles:
ITM Web Service - EventsForCalendarByDateRange
ITM Web Service - AuthenticateUser
Wikipedia - description of web services
Wikipedia - WS-Security