Scott Leslie's excellent EdTechPost blog recently highlighted the press release from WebCT on the IMS Tools Interoperability Special Interest Group.

I participate in this working group with Blackboard and the University of Wiskonsin who were not mentioned in the press release. I'm actually in a working meeting with the team now...

I was disappointed by this press release so early on in our development as it has already lead to the hype I was seeking to avoid by ensuring this group was not labeled a 'specification' and put in the same category as IMS Content Packaging or Metadata. Those specs are well grounded and tested and I have built several systems that use them for interoperability with other Learning Management Systems.

It is so important to manage expectations in the education technology space.

This is not the 'wonder pill' of systems interoperability. WebCT, Blackboard, Perceptions (Question Mark), the Samigo project, Wiskonsin and Sun are all working hard to develop some scenarios using web services as one mechanism to show how you might launch an external tool from your LMS.
We are having to work around constraints imposed on us by existing system interfaces and limited resources. I am a strong advocate of good architecture foundations and open systems.
This is an integration project with a very simple context and Systems Integration is no simple thing. I spent may 'droid' years at Andersens gluing systems together and now focus much of my efforts on 'real world' SOA... I won't start on the SOA hype - more later...

This is only the first step and we have a long way to go. I'll keep you posted on our progress...