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05 Sep 08 Hey, Your iMIS Is in My Drupal

Good news to report today. It’s taken longer than anticipated, but we have our first working connection between iMIS and Drupal!

First of all, what is iMIS? If you haven’t heard us throw around this term before, it’s our membership database, and it  tracks all of your dues, committee assignments, round tables and sections memberships, conference registrations, etc. It’s much more than just a database, though, as it’s also the software that lets us update committee rosters each year, send you conference registration info, etc.

We’ve known all along that ALA Connect had to be able to work with iMIS in order for us to be able to tell what your affiliations are within ALA. So it’s with great relief that we can report that last week, our developer – Urban Insight – conducted a successful test that allowed users to log in to ALA Connect (Drupal) using their regular website logins (from iMIS). This is a huge step forward for phase one, as it means you won’t have to memorize yet another login.

Even better, it means we can pre-populate a lot of your profile for you. So if you’re a member of ACRL and you serve on a committee, we’ll fill that in for you ahead of time. As we set up the virtual workspace for your committee, Connect will also give you access to it automatically within the system so that you don’t have to sign up for it manually. Three cheers for saving the user’s time!

This also bodes well for phase two of our project, in which we make all of your data start working hard for you.  We hope to be able to get previous “participations,” as well as current ones, so we should be able to pre-populate your profile with all of the great work you’ve done for ALA in your professional career. That way, if you decide you want to display your profile to colleagues, potential employers, or even publicly, we’ll have created a curriculam vitae of all of your contributions. Pretty cool, right?

But I’m getting ahead of myself, as we have to get phase one out the door first. As work on the iMIS/Drupal module continues, I want to note the great work Urban Insight is doing (go, Ki!), pioneering something I know a lot of other associations are also anxiously awaiting. The folks at RSM McGladrey wrote the original iMIS web service methods (yay, Susan and Bruce!), which are working very well, so we couldn’t have gotten this far without them, either.

It’s exciting to have crossed this bridge, and we should have a new timeline to share soon. Keep watching this site for more updates.

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    […] we’ve faced with this project is connecting our complex membership structure to Drupal. Back in September, we excitedly noted our first success in this area (well, Urban Insight’s success, as they wrote the i2d engine that powers […]