Blackboard Learn's building block system allows us to interact with new tools and content within our system. However, some integration options won't use a building block but would still want to interact with our Blackboard Learn environment. Web services allow third-party web applications to pull and push data between their environment and instance. One example of using a web service is Blackboard Connect's one-way text-messaging option. The created web service regularly pushes users' mobile phone numbers to a secure server which manages and sends the messages for our Blackboard Learn instance.
We access Web Services by clicking on the Web Services link in our Building Block module.
Here we see all the current web services installed within our environment. In our Manage Web Services area, we can set the internal secret. This secret is used between the web framework and the web session. We can also upload a ZIP or WAR file that creates a new web service. This...