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Zia is currently helping an online university automate its business processes using Alfresco.  Currently, a small portion of the school’s content is managed in Alfresco.  The bulk of the content (quizzes, assignments, etc.) is stored in Moodle, unmanaged.

Zia has built web services for the 1.9.x Moodle servers that allow Alfresco’s automated workflows to backup/restore a Moodle course and to grant/deny access to a Moodle course for a particular user.

Moodle 2.0 provides some out-of-the-box Alfresco integration, but no services like the ones outlined above.  There is, however, greatly improved web service support with Moodle 2.0.

Zia’s extensions to Moodle allow their client to implement the following business process:

  1. A professor, using the Alfresco user interface, requests to make a change to a course.
  2. Alfresco (by calling a web service) grants the professor write access to a development copy of the Moodle course.
  3. The professor makes the desired changes in Moodle, and then goes into Alfresco to submit the changes to the editorial team (by marking the workflow task assigned to him as complete).
  4. Alfresco then removes the professor’s access to the development Moodle course, to prevent him/her from making changes during the review process.  An automated workflow step pulls the content from the development Moodle instance and the production Moodle instance and compares the two.  The document that summarizes the changes is attached to the workflow.  A workflow task is assigned to the editorial team to review the changes.
  5. A member of the editorial team then approves or rejects the change.  If the change is approved, an automated workflow step backs up the production Moodle course and checks it into Alfresco.  Then the development Moodle is backed up and restored into production.

This automation provides several key advantages to the university:

  1. Improved turnaround time.  The automated process is much faster.
  2. Reduced error rate.  The system won’t forget a step, or accidentally modify the wrong course.
  3. Improved editorial control.  The editors don’t have take the professors‘ word for what changed; the system shows them the changes.
  4. Revision control of course content.  The school now has a revision history of the changes to the course, and can “roll back” to a previous version if necessary.

Please conatct us if you’re interested in learning more about Moodle integration with Alfresco.

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