The objective of the Access 4 Learning (A4L) Community, formerly the SIF Association, is to enable disparate vendor applications to exchange data, without the end-user re-entering data multiple times, to provide secure and consistent information to all applications across a given zone/environment. The A4L Community established the SIF Certification Program to help ensure that data is 
successfully transferred between applications and that the transferred data successfully resides in all sharing applications, by using an open, community developed data standard – the SIF Specification. The SIF Certification Program is a voluntary program, and is open to any member of the A4L Community.
The certification program benefits both customers and vendors by:
- Providing end users an assurance of a high level of conformance and interoperability between SIF-certified products.
- Reducing the vendor’s costs and risks involved with getting a product certified.
