Lake Mary, FL - 14 September, 2006 - The IMS Global Learning Consortium announced today that Informs, developers of the first open source student services system, SIS^J2K, has joined as a Contributing Member of IMS.

"IMS/GLC is excited to have Informs as a Contributing Member in IMS and we look forward to their participation in our recently started Enterprise and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) work." said Rob Abel, CEO of IMS/GLC. "This continues the exciting trend toward open source and non-open source organizations working together through community developed standards to provide best of breed solutions to the education market." Abel added.

"We believe that the new Enterprise and SOA work in IMS will lead the way in providing a new level of choice and flexibility in how student information systems can be configured along with course management systems to provide a student-centered campus experience," remarked Mike Underwood, Informs CEO and President. "We believe that the education market is looking for new alternatives that provide greater value as it relates to an institution's teaching and learning objectives, and that this is an important issue for providers to work on in a community."

IMS interoperability standards, such as Content Packaging, Question-Test items, and Enterprise, are used extensively in the education industry worldwide. The new Enterprise group is working to define a new specification that will address real-time provisioning, conformance, and other key improvements. The Service Oriented Architecture group is working on developing best practices and guidelines for foundational enterprise-level services that provide support across diverse applications, including student information systems and course management systems. Other active IMS work includes digital content interoperability, service interfaces to rich media learning applications, accessibility and personalization, and high stakes assessment.

About IMS Global Learning Consortium
IMS/GLC is the leading advocacy group encouraging the growth and impact of learning technology worldwide. IMS/GLC is a global, nonprofit, member organization that provides leadership in shaping and growing the learning industry through community development of standards, promotion of innovation, and research into best practices. For more information visit http://www.imsglobal.org.

About Informs
Information Management Specialists, Inc. (Informs), headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama is a software engineering firm that offers products, personnel and services to government agencies, private businesses, institutions of higher education and non-profit organizations. Informs is a privately held corporation, incorporated in the State of Alabama in April 1979. The company has been successfully implementing complex, large-scale computer systems throughout the United States for almost three decades. The mission of Informs is to develop and maintain a secure position as a preferred provider of affordable, high quality, automated systems and related services.

For More Information:
Please contact:
Lisa Mattson at lmattson@imsglobal.org

Rose Thorsen, Vice President
Student Information Systems
Information Management Specialists, Inc.
(334) 277-0372x456
rthorsen@informs.com

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