Last week, mobility software providers gathered in Warsaw to jointly review, discuss and test the implementation of specific functionalities and business processes to exchange IIAs and LAs.

Amongst others the Italian programmers from the CINECA system as well as BeSmart SRL, the Spanish SIGMA and Czech IU4S provider, joined this first workshop. Apart from them several in-house providers took part, either in Warsaw or remotely. The EWP Dashboard, the so-called reference implementation, was represented as well. After a round of introductions, the draft mandatory business requirements were presented and discussed for setting the stage. Afterwards participants looked into detail to the technical exchange scenarios and flows, also highlighting the most common misunderstandings of the specification.

The bulk of the time was devoted to testing connections for inter-institutional agreements (IIA) and learning agreements (LA) amongst each other and with the EWP Dashboard. Especially testing LAs proved successful with many nodes being able to exchange learning agreements following the EWP protocols. IIA-testing was less successful but by addressing and discussing the issues live the main gaps were more easily identified and participants went home with some very concrete ideas on how to improve their implementation.

Several technical issues were also discussed with participants and good practices were exchanged. Although organisers had hoped to have more participants, the outcome of the event was an important step in building trust and a common understanding within the EWP Developers community.

A second workshop will take place next week, 20-21 September. Some of the bigger software providers have already registered and the EWP Dashboard team will be present again as well. It is a good opportunity for everyone working on EWP connections to get together and find strengths and gaps in their implementation so please inform your provider about the event. The event will be hybrid, the link for the event will be shared with the registered participants.

The workshops are part of the Interoperability Reinforcement Plan aiming to solve issues that obstruct end-users of exchanging IIAs and LAs seamlessly.

Join the business user groups and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates.