Intro

If you want to know what you are doing and how the integration works, read all the sections in this guide.

Who should read this guide?

• Anyone that wants integrate LAMS with their existing or new:
  • Moodle 1.5+
  • .LRN 2.1.3 or 2.2
  • Sakai 2.0
  • Blackboard v6
    
    

General and System Requirements

Software:

• LAMS v1.0.2 or above (see system requirements and installation instructions)
• Any of the LMS versions mentioned above (see system requirements according to the LMS you use)
• The Moodle, .LRN, Sakai, Blackboard LAMS Module (see LAMS Integrations)
  

You can install LAMS and the LMS in the same server or on separate servers. It really depends on your setup, the size of the clases you have, the concurrency of users, size of the server, etc. If you need general advice on this, ask in the Tech forum in the LAMS Community.

Network setup:

How does LAMS work with these LMSs?

The integration has been designed in a way that you only need to maintain your existing LMS. Once you integrate LAMS with your favorite LMS, LAMS will become a pseudo slave of your LMS and little to no maintanance is required on the LAMS side.

General overview

This LMS integration modules are maily responsible for the following:

1. Work as liason between the LMS and LAMS
2. Call the LAMS webservices to get information about sequences and classes
3. Provide interface for LAMS Monitor and Authoring
4. Provide the authentication for LAMS (using a hash generated on-the-fly)
5. Provide an interface for LAMS to get basic information about users (username, first name and last name)
6. Behaves in the LMS just like any other LMS' tool (deploys, admin, display, etc -according to the functions available in each LMS)

Getting LAMS and the LMS to communicate

As you can see in the graph above, there's communication bothways between LAMS and the LMS. So both have to be configured to "connect" to each other.

• A server_id
• A server_key (which you need to ensure you keep private and secure)
• The URL where the LAMS server is install

On the LAMS side you need to:

• Login in LAMS as system administrator (the user you use when installed LAMS) and create a new top level organization and get the organization id.
• Then insert manually on the LAMS database the integration record containing the organization id you just created, the server_id, server_key, a prefix for the users and the user informtion callback URL.

Quick visual walkthru LAMS Integration with other LMSs

In the LAMS side

1. login in LAMS as a sysadmin (the user that you created at installation time)

ernieg@lamsmoodle:~$ mysql -u root -p 
Enter password: 
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 6708 to server version: 4.1.10a-Debian_2-log

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> use lams
Database changed

mysql> select sid, name from u_organisation;

+------+----------------------------------------------------+
| sid  | name                                               |
+------+----------------------------------------------------+
|    1 | All Organisations                                  |
|    2 | Demo Org                                           |
|    3 | DemoClass                                          |
| 1030 | Macquarie University                               | 
+------+----------------------------------------------------+

mysql> insert into ext_server_org_map 
      (serverid, serverkey, servername, serverdesc, prefix, orgid) values 
      ('lamsserver01', 'secretkey2005', 'Macquarie Uni server', 
      'Server using Moodle installed in this and that location. Contact Random Striker at 9850-9070', 
      'mq', '1030');

• serverid: this is the server identification string that we will use to individually identify the LMS server that will be "talking" to LAMS.
• serverkey: this is the secret key that both systems will be used to encrypt the hash when doing authentication. Make sure you keep your server key private
• servername: the server name
• serverdesc: a meaningful server description
• prefix: the prefix that the usernames will have in LAMS. (usually just one or two letters will do)
• orgid: this is the organisation id we just saw about for Macquarie University (in this case 1030)

mysql> update ext_server_org_map 
       set userinfo_url = 'http://moodle.mq.edu.au/mod/lams/userinfo.php?un=%username%&ts=%timestamp%&hs=%hash%' 
       where orgid = '1030';

On the LMS side (in this case Moodle, but the same config info applies to all)

Problems and Comments?

Post them in the Tech Forum in the LAMS Community