WHITE PAPER SERIES. Ellucian Elevate Integration

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER SERIES Ellucian Elevate Integration

2 Ellucian Elevate Integration The Business Need 3 Integration Approach 4 How This All Works 4 A Progressive Development of Integration 7 Integration from the Cloud 7 About Ellucian 8

3 ELLUCIAN INTEGRATION 3 The Business Need Ellucian recognizes that a single source of truth for decisionmaking is a key part of the vision behind most enterprise IT initiatives within Higher Education, so having one source of operational data has become a critical business imperative. Adding new business applications to an organization to handle specific requirements can make the situation more complex unless a clear integration strategy is delivered which ensures that data is not duplicated unnecessarily. When we defined the vision for Ellucian Elevate, we talked to and listened to lots of customers. What we heard clearly was that what was needed, was a business application for streamlining the key business processes supporting your Continuing Education departments while at the same time not adding to the effort required by the IT and MIS teams to support and manage it. We also understood that despite best efforts, your Student ERP was not well suited to unique requirements of the Continuing Education and Workforce Development. Initially these looked like mutually exclusive objectives but we thought hard about the problem, keeping both objectives clearly in view. In Ellucian Elevate, we believe that we ve addressed both of these challenges by developing a cloud-hosted web application that can be deployed quickly, configured by business users and accessed by faculty, students and administrators on any PC or mobile device to manage your Continuing Education and Workforce development teams. At the core of the solution however, is an Integration strategy that is focused on ensuring that you can leverage all of the work done around your core Student ERP. In short; we enable you to maintain a complete picture of students, course catalog and resource utilization from within your Student ERP while building on top of this to better support your Continuing Education and Workforce Development departments.

4 ELLUCIAN INTEGRATION 4 Integration Approach We have approached integration from a business rather than a technical perspective, which means we ve focused first on some of the business issues that we feel will help reduce back office processing and improve the service you deliver to staff and students. More importantly we ve ensured that your IT and Institutional reporting teams will be comfortable that we ve addressed the risk of reducing data quality in your main student ERP. We ve taken a very different approach to the integration in that we ve created a shared view of important Continuing Education and Workforce Development data to provide a single reporting view and tight control from the perspective of the Student ERP system whilst enabling autonomy and freedom for the business users in the Continuing Education Department. How This All Works This approach is best understood by taking some examples of how things work in the integrated ecosystem. At the core of the integration strategy, the Student ERP always knows about all students, resources, courses and registrations, including those created within the Elevate application. Because of this, it stays the main system of record, so generating reports, transcripts and other data extracts from within the Student ERP will always provide the most complete picture across both Credit and non-credit registrations. It will also always provide a complete picture of student population, registrations and resource utilization and availability across the campus. Scenario 1: Student Registration in Elevate When students self-register through your website for a CE course, your main focus will be getting them registered as fast and painlessly as possible while ensuring that you can catch any students that may already be registered in the Student ERP. To achieve this, when a student self-registers, we offer them the option of either logging in (if they already have or know their userid and password) or creating a new login from scratch. Whenever a new login is created within Elevate, Elevate checks for any matching student within the ERP and if it finds one, tags a possible match between the existing student and the new Elevate record. In the case of self-registration, potential matches are picked up in the background to speed up the registration process and they re placed in a work queue for later validation by the admin team. When the registration is performed by admin staff, they can do the matching in real time as they register the student.

5 ELLUCIAN INTEGRATION 5 New users are created and registered within Elevate If a match is found the records are associated with each other MATCH FOUND IN ERP REGISTRATION Once associated, the course registration is propagated REGISTRATION PROPAGATED REGISTRATION, The Student ERP and Elevate are now both fully aware of the Student and the course registration. From this point onwards, any changes in the Student record that are relevant to Elevate (for example bio-data or course registrations) are updated in this shared view. This process is asymmetric so Elevate only ever knows about students that have registered on a CE/WFD course and it only stores data relevant to CE/ WFD registrations.

6 ELLUCIAN INTEGRATION 6 Scenario 2: Student is Graded and Completes a Course within Elevate In this scenario, a student has completed a CE course and their grades and completion status are entered in Elevate. GRADE AND COMPLETION STATUS ENTERED REGISTRATION, A certificate is then available for this course within Elevate to the admin staff and also to the student within the self-service portal. CERTIFICATE AVAILABLE WITHIN REGISTRATION, Once this has happened, Elevate updates the shared view of the registration so the Student ERP now knows about the additional course completion. Where configured, a new Student transcript complete with all Credit courses and also the CE/WFD course completions is available for printing by the central academic records team. ACADEMIC TRANSRCIPT REGISTRATION,

7 ELLUCIAN INTEGRATION 7 With live links to the campus Finance application, all student debt transactions that are captured within Ellucian Elevate enable student debt tracking and management to be performed within Elevate, propagating summarized booking and payment transactions by course to the General Ledger. A Progressive Development of Integration In future releases, Elevate will support similar shared models for resources such as Rooms and Faculty. Elevate will consult the Student ERP to determine which resource availability so that they are not double booked. In addition, a single system of record for Room and Faculty load within the Student ERP can be used to optimize costs and meet regulatory requirements. Understanding how course costs are changing in real time enables your business users to take corrective action for specific courses, focusing on recruitment and cancelling or merging courses to minimize costs. Course definitions for CE/WFD are shared with the Student ERP as they are created and changed within Elevate to ensure that a single Course Catalog is always available within the main Student Record System. Integration from the Cloud Ellucian Elevate is hosted in Amazon AWS Cloud Data Centers that provide elastic scaling and high resilience facilities for operating mission critical applications. The US data centers are certified to comply with Information Security standards including SOC1 (SSAE 16), PCI DSS, ISO 27001, FIPS and FedRAMP. The core technology behind Ellucian Elevate is already being used by many customers in live cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-premise integrations handling upwards of 200,000 registered students with other enterprise applications. Works Out of the Box Ellucian Elevate comes with a built-in connector and integration points for both Ellucian Banner and Ellucian Colleague to ensure that right out of the box you can easily connect your existing Ellucian Student ERP to your hosted Continuing Education solution. In addition, Ellucian Elevate integrates out of the box with Electronic Payment, address cleansing and SMS messaging Cloud Services. Code Free Configuration Our Integration solution is entirely configured through a web administration interface, meaning that you won t need to alter a single line of code to change the behavior of the integration.

8 ELLUCIAN INTEGRATION 8 Secure and Scaleable By hosting on Amazons AWS servers, we can ramp up your server capacity to respond to any scale of growth in your registrations. By utilizing only standard https protocols, the traffic between the on-premise and cloud applications is always encrypted and highly secure. Based on RESTful Architecture Ellucian Elevate uses standard RESTful web services to power its integration stack to ensure that we remain compatible not only with your Student ERP but also with any other Enterprise applications that will need to integrate with in the future. The integration is extensible to include applications such as your Learning Management, Accounts Receivable, Identity Management and other enterprise applications. Fig 3. Cloud to Cloud & Cloud to Premise Integration TOUCHNET online payments ELLUCIAN STRIKEIRON address cleansing SMS/TEXT BANNER/COLLEAGUE WCMS (website) About Ellucian Ellucian helps education institutions thrive in an open and dynamic world. We deliver a broad portfolio of technology solutions, developed in collaboration with a global education community, and provide strategic guidance to help education institutions of all kinds navigate change, achieve greater transparency, and drive efficiencies. More than 2,400 institutions in 40 countries around the world look to Ellucian for the ideas and insights that will move education forward, helping people everywhere discover their futures through learning. To learn more, please visit

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