Many universities give freshmen symbolic keys at the new student convocation ceremony. This tradition stems from medieval practices and symbolizes a student’s freedom to access campus resources and participate in university life. In real life, new students want to receive their security ID cards to identify themselves when on campus and access the allowed areas.
Ensuring that new students can collect their security ID cards at the start of the term is vital. However, synchronizing student data between a student information system and a security and card access system takes time. One of our customers, a university in the UK, wanted to automate data integration from Ellucian Banner SaaS to a security and card access system.
Security is a top priority for Ellucian, and that’s why they selected a trusted partner to deliver this integration. The ABCloudz team built two reusable Data Connect pipelines to ensure seamless data integration and prompt production of security cards for new students. To complete this project, our team used techniques and approaches from other successful Ellucian Banner SaaS integrations for parking, library, or alumni management systems.
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Project goals and technology challenges
The main goal of this project is to ensure the timely production of security ID cards. Not only for new students, although this use case is crucial at the start of the term. Student data changes from time to time, and the automated data integration solution must reflect all these changes in the security and card access system.
With an existing manual approach, the university struggled to keep student data up-to-date in the third-party security and card access system. At the same time, they believe that an automated data integration can ensure continuous data synchronization.
The last but not least requirement was to use the latest photo for the student ID cards. The university stores student photos in the Banner Document Management Solution (BDMS). BDMS is a system for higher education institutions to digitally store, manage, and retrieve documents, integrating with Ellucian Banner and other Ellucian products. As a result, administrators request each photo manually when printing ID cards.
Current state architecture
The following image shows the current state architecture of the manual integration between an on-premises Ellucian Banner database, Banner Document Management Solution, and the third-party security and card access system.
At the first step, manual SQL scripts extract data from the on-premises Banner database. Next, the database administrators format the extracted CSV files into a compatible format for the security and card access system. After uploading these files to the SFTP server, the administrators of this security and card access system run HTTP requests to get student photos.
Orchestrating SQL fittings to design reusable data pipelines
The ABCloudz team used several fittings to streamline the development of Ellucian Data Connect pipelines. A fitting is a building block in your Data Connect pipeline. Each fitting performs a specific data management task. You can choose these fittings from the existing templates or create and approve your own fitting. The following list includes the fittings required in this integration.
- The Ethos Consume Change Notifications fitting tracks changes in the source Banner SaaS database.
- The Ethos Proxy Get fitting extracts the data from the source Banner SaaS database.
- The HTTP Request fitting requests authorization to extract photos from the BDMS.
- The Delimited Formatter fitting creates the output CSV file.
- The JavaScript Transform fitting formats the data according to the requirements.
Our team has solid experience with implementing these fittings. Using these fittings helps streamline the data pipelines development and overcome the data access limitations in Ellucian Banner SaaS. Building integrations without these elegant solutions might require more time and resources. For future projects, the ABCloudz team can reuse either the whole pipeline or a set of its fittings.
Future state architecture
To automate this integration, our team implemented a change data capture (CDC) technique. This technique involves the bulk data migration followed by replicating changes that occur in the source Banner SaaS database. As a result, we created two Data Connect pipelines.
The following image shows the future state architecture of this automated integration.
Before the scheduled data synchronization begins, our team configures an Ethos subscription that enables Banner SaaS to publish change notifications. Once the subscription is in place, the Data Connect pipelines can retrieve newly created or updated records using the Change Notifications fitting. Next, the administrators configure the pipeline settings, such as the Amazon S3 bucket, folder, access key, and secret access key.
After completing these prerequisites, we ran the first pipeline to load all student data in bulk. The name of the created CSV file includes the date when the pipeline extracted data. This file contains such information as the name, date of birth, student ID number, and start and end dates.
Following, we scheduled the second pipeline to run after a student completes enrollment and confirms that the information is correct. This pipeline extracts the updated, inserted, or deleted records since the last run. Next, the security and card access system uses this CSV file to replicate these changes in the target database.
Benefits and results
The ABCloudz team configured these well-oiled Data Connect pipelines to run in the Ellucian Banner SaaS environment. By automating the data integration process, the university can rest assured that the new students enjoy their experience from day one. In particular, students can use their cards to access the allowed services and campus facilities.
The security ID cards now include the latest photo of each student, and the printing process doesn’t have mistakes caused by human factors. These cards open all the required doors, and we hope that these happy students will open many more doors in their future lives.
Streamline your Ellucian integrations with ABCloudz
Having delivered many reusable Ellucian integrations, ABCloudz is your perfect partner for completing an integration of any complexity. Modernizing your Ellucian environment to the Banner SaaS database can be painless and hassle-free. All you need is a trusted expert in transitioning to Data Connect and Ellucian Ethos.
Check our modernization practice page and an impressive portfolio of completed Ellucian-based projects for higher education institutions. Contact ABCloudz to learn how you can take advantage of our expertise in adopting the best that Ellucian SaaS has to offer.