Mercury ™ a generic interface between student management systems
Mercury Brochure

MERCURY

A generic interface between student management systems

Given the track record of Governments and Government agencies Mercury will continue to evolve but, in a sense, that is the whole point. Mercury does the evolving and its users (and their software suppliers) don't have to.


Mercury is a relay agent and is currently in development by Meta Office. This tool will make life easier for tertiary education organisations (TEOs) and the government agencies to which they report.


Meta Office has been active in the student management system (SMS) market for a number of years. During that time we have developed various data exchange mechanisms, many of which are common across our products.

In broad terms there are three main types of data exchange:

  1. The passing of data from one student management system to another. Usually in one direction but sometimes in both directions.


  2. The acquisition of register and reference data from various tertiary agencies by a tertiary education organisation (TEO) for import into its SMS.


  3. The compilation and export of data from a TEO's SMS to tertiary agencies, e.g. the Single Data Return.

There is a compliance aspect to all three of these data exchanges which has its origins in section 159YC of the Education Act 1989.

In 2010 the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) launched a project to replace the Single Data Return (SDR) with the Tertiary Learner Event Collection (TLEC). The SDR is a type 3 data exchange in the list above whereby TEOs report demographic, funding, enrolment, and outcome data to TEC and the Ministry of Education.

Experience tells us that however TLEC is implemented it is unlikely to be an all-encompassing return which makes other returns redundant. It is also highly likely that TLEC will change over time and probably quite quickly in the first few years.

The Mercury project has been set up to develop a generic software tool that facilitates the validation and transfer of specified data from any given source to any given destination. It will handle the movement of data in both directions and, therefore, will meet the requirements of the three data exchanges described above.

Because of its generic nature Mercury will ultimately also be capable of enabling data exchanges in other education sectors and, indeed, in other fields such as health.

For more information download this brochure.