This is what more and more marketplace providers are promoting for ‘ease of use’ of their products.  In contrast, more and more school CIO-types are stating that the bevy of APIs they must utilize (plus the constant changes made to them), have become a data management nightmare.  Since the A4L Community supports vendors and end users, it makes sense for us to look for ways to standardize and simplify.  The idea: standardize an infrastructure for data transport that can carry any data model ‘on the wire’.