Fulcrum has been spearheading numerous initiatives in the Higher Education sector to overcome the challenges faced by universities and the Government, due to lack of information on students activities. Fulcrum has come up with an innovative solution which was based on a SOA framework.

Fulcrum has developed a solution which;

• Focuses on Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) implementation using SOA, where Fulcrum has integrated selective application/ dataset from universities system

• The ESB collects data on the student's financial standing from the schools Finance system, learning and participation details from Blackboard, student records data from a web service, exposed by the client’s system and the login details from a Google API. Once the data is collected and aggregated using a BizTalk orchestration, the data is pushed to the SQL reporting database.

• Querying the reporting database a report will be generated showing the details of the data collected to identify the status of a particular student in the institution. 

In another scenario, if students transfer between universities or apply for a job, prior to our engagement there was no certain way to find out if a student is forging information on his/her application. Thus, Fulcrum has come up with a solution which can be used as a connector for various universities and access their databases to validate the student’s record.

Fulcrum has developed a cloud-based Integration Framework which can be connected to the Higher Education Degree Database (HEDD) application system. This integration framework also develops and implements connectors between the ESB and each type of the Student Record System application so that all Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) could provide rapid updates of information to HEDD.

The details of the student are requested by the Fulcrum SOA enabled framework from the university system that is intended for validation. The framework then does the comparison of the data without storing the information in any staging environment, to ensure data security. Based on the validation of the details, as “YES” or “NO” the response is again sent back to HEDD application in the form of a response message.

Using this SOA based framework, we wish to demonstrate an even more challenging situation by:

• Creating the open-source-based Enterprise Service Bus inside a cloud-based environment.
• Designing and constructing appropriate connectors between the HEDD application operating within the graduate prospects computer environment and the ESB.
• Design, create and test connectors between the ESB and a variety of different student record systems.
• Implement the connectors within a number of universities and demonstrate that the HEDD application is now fully integrated, via the ESB and SOA connectors, with the core application systems at those universities.
• Create a web services/SOA registry in to which the connectors can be placed with appropriate documentation so that other HEIs could locate, download and then utilize the connectors within their institution.
• Support another HEI to monitor the ease/difficulty with which they could then implement the appropriate connectors to roll-out the HEDD application in to their institution. 

Apart from the above mentioned solutions, Fulcrum has also conducted an Enterprise Architecture Assessment for various Universities.