This specification is being used primarily in the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand; however, it is increasingly being implemented in India, and elsewhere.
Many district and site technology coordinators also experience an increase in technical support problems from maintaining numerous proprietary systems.
It was designed to be an initiative drawing upon the strengths of the leading vendors in the K-12 market to enable schools' IT professionals to build, manage and upgrade their systems.
It was endorsed by close to 20 leading K-12 vendors of student information, library, transportation, food service applications and more.
In 2000, the National School Boards Association held a panel discussion during its annual meeting on the topic of SIF.
In 2007 in the United Kingdom Becta has championed the adoption of SIF as a national standard for schools data interchange.
A4L members collaborate on a variety of technical solutions and standards which include but are not limited to the Schools Interoperability Framework.
This is not particular to SIF but to any record-level, automated system moving standardized data from one source to another in a heterogeneous environment.
SIF 2.x relied on using a broker called a Zone Integration Server (ZIS) to manage communication between applications.
However, the current infrastructure specification supports RESTful connections directly between applications AND/OR utilizing a brokered environment.
Data travels between applications as a series of standardized messages, queries, and events written in XML or JSON and sent using Internet protocols.
SIF was designed before REST, SOAP, namespaces, and web service standards were as mature as they are today.
Web service standards are also designed to support secure public interfaces and XML appliances can make the setup and configuration easier.
This is a boon to the thousands of districts and many states using the SIF 2 infrastructure and allows a clean migration path to utilizing more modern RestFUL architectures if desired.
These are the result of work being done by various members of the association (vendors, agencies, regional centers) on a more easily adopted, easier to implement sub-set of the specification that handles the roster and basic uses cases.
[16][17] The Access for Learning community has recently started taking strong leadership in the education Privacy space globally.