Publication Date: July 2003
DCL ID: GEN-03-09
The Office of Federal Student Aid is adjusting the XML implementation schedule. This letter explains the reasons behind this adjustment.
Posted on 07-30-2003
July 2003
GEN-03-09
Adjusted XML implementation schedule
Summary: The Office of Federal Student Aid is adjusting the XML implementation schedule. This letter explains the reasons behind this adjustment.
Dear Colleague:
The Office of Federal Student Assistance (FSA), the Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council (PESC), and the National Council of Higher Education Loan Programs (NCHELP) have been working collaboratively for approximately two years on the development and design of the Common Record standard to achieve consensus on an XML higher education standard that enables all stakeholders to receive maximum benefit from the adoption of XML technology, with better, faster, cheaper information exchange.
FSA remains committed to XML as an effective tool to meet the current and future business needs of FSA, schools and the community. FSA realizes that a large benefit of XML is the creation and adoption of a community based XML standard. In 03-04, FSA changed every XML tag name in the Common Record: COD to align with community standards. In 04-05 additional changes have been negotiated. While FSA supports these changes, these changes have been negotiated prior to testing and implementation of Common Record: CommonLine, the Academic Transcript, and prior to the completion of FSA’s XML Framework. FSA is committed to the community standard and also recognizes that there must be a balance between the benefit and burden of change for our customers. Therefore, in order to manage change, FSA will not change the COD schema to align with the community standard in 04-05.
FSA’s future plans include the following:
- The COD schema will be updated to conform to the community standard. It is anticipated that these changes will be made for 05-06.
- In order to ensure that FSA is not publishing schemas following different standards, the Common Record:ISIR will not be operational until 05-06. At that time, the ISIR schema will fully align with the community standard.
- Because FSA does not wish to mandate using a schema with known changes pending, FSA will extend the requirement to use XML for COD until 05-06.
Again, the community remains dedicated to a community standard. The collaborative efforts of the past two years have been extraordinary and we look forward to the continuation of this endeavor.
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