The data fabric is the new nervous system of any business. This quote from the CEO of Google Cloud highlights the need to keep data in sync between different systems in your organization. You can’t underestimate the significance of timely student data synchronization, especially when it comes to student data in a major US university. However, when our customer decided to move from on-premises Ellucian Banner to the Banner SaaS platform, their existing data integration and synchronization workflows began to fall apart.
To integrate Ellucian Banner SaaS with Salesforce Education Data Architecture (EDA), our customer needed expert support. The ABCloudz team was happy to lend a helping hand and develop this complex integration by using native Ellucian tools and services. In particular, we built Data Connect pipelines, configured notifications in the Experience dashboard, and created reports in Ellucian Insights.
This blog post highlights the ABCloudz expertise in building a bespoke data integration solution while migrating the Ellucian Banner to a cloud-based SaaS platform. As world champions in database migrations, our team always shines with this type of project. Over the past years, we delivered many modernization and integration projects for higher education institutions across the globe.
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Learn more about our comprehensive experience with the Ellucian-based software from these blog posts. From a parking solution and bookstore platform to an alumni management system — you name it, we’ve done this kind of integration! To get started, contact ABCloudz today.
Assessing the integration challenges
The first problem for our customer was the change of their core platform architecture. They migrated from an on-premises Ellucian Banner Oracle database to the cloud-based Ellucian Banner SaaS platform, which exposes data exclusively through Ethos APIs. The benefits of this new cloud solution are evident. However, as you can’t teach the old dog new tricks, you can’t reuse Oracle database scripts in a Banner SaaS environment.
With the old database, the university had to decommission hundreds of data integration scripts running on the Dell Boomi platform. They’ve been developing these scripts for many years, and now they need to implement all this business logic for the Ellucian SaaS integration model. These scripts move data in both directions: from the Ellucian Banner database to Salesforce EDA and the other way around.
Boomi orchestrates synchronization between Salesforce and Ellucian Banner databases by using a collection of scripts that handle inbound contact and application data, outbound student and faculty academic data, and periodic email updates. Boomi manages record detection, transformation, routing, error handling, and logging.
Finally, our customer wanted to improve the error-handling process. The current integration in Boomi sends emails when a data integration error occurs. Systems administrators address these issues manually so that the next run of the script correctly picks up the changes. Without automatic retries, failed records might appear in Ellucian Banner with a significant delay.
With all these challenges in mind, we are ready to review the architecture of the existing integration.
Current-state architecture
The following image shows the current state of the existing data integration architecture.
The customer maintains a total of 24 Boomi scripts, which are part of the four primary workflows. Two of these workflows transfer data from the Banner Oracle database to the Salesforce EDA platform. The other two workflows move data in the opposite direction. Each workflow includes the extract, transform, and load (ETL) scripts that manage data accordingly.
The following list shows workflows that transfer data from Banner to Salesforce.
- Students and faculty.
This workflow runs every 30 minutes and transfers data about program enrollment, course offering, course connection, faculty contact, term, and status. - Institutional emails.
This workflow discovers newly created institutional emails and usernames every two hours.
The following list shows workflows that transfer data from Salesforce to Banner.
- New contacts and applications.
This workflow runs every five minutes to synchronize personal and biographical data of new student records. This information includes such fields as name, gender, race, addresses, phones, emails, additional identifiers, and so on. - Updated applications.
This workflow reflects admission decision updates in Banner. These updates include decision codes, college transcripts, degree data, and checklist items.
The ABCloudz approach
As you can see, multiple Boomi scripts cover different use cases, from adding new records to changes of an address or a surname. Because these scripts interact with the Oracle database, you can’t reuse them in the Banner SaaS integration model.
Our team approached this project in two sure steps. At the first step, we analyzed each legacy Boomi workflow and redesigned it as a native Data Connect pipeline using Ethos APIs. After we completed this step, the customer started testing the integration with the new SaaS environment. At the second step, we optimized the structure of the whole data integration to increase the performance and remove the unused business logic. Also, in this optimized solution, we fixed the issues discovered during testing.
The new integration includes several Data Connect pipelines that ensure fast, secure, and reliable data transfer in both directions. This solution interacts with the Ethos API to ensure seamless data transfer to and from the Ellucian Banner SaaS platform. Also, this solution displays notifications in the Ellucian Experience dashboard and creates reports in Ellucian Insights.
Future-state architecture
The following image shows the future-state architecture of this bidirectional data integration.
The ABCloudz team recreated all four workflows using native Ellucian SaaS capabilities. Our team implemented these workflows as Data Connect pipelines that rely exclusively on Ethos APIs for data exchange within the SaaS environment.
On the other side, these workflows interact with a secure Amazon S3 bucket. In turn, Salesforce also interacts with this S3 bucket to get and store files.
Each of the Ellucian Data Connect workflows creates a report in Ellucian Insights that includes information about its run. Also, each workflow sends notifications to the Ellucian Experience dashboard, where systems administrators can see its status. For the error log, these workflows add files to the Amazon S3 bucket.
Benefits and results
The ABCloudz team delivered this complex integration project for a major US university. Overall, this integration is fast, accurate, auditable, recoverable, and secure by design. The business outcome of this integration project includes the following benefits.
- Salesforce system administrators have up-to-date student and course data from BannerSaaS to effectively manage administrative and academic processes in their system.
- Admissions officers have seamless access to student application data from Salesforce within the Banner SaaS platform to efficiently process and manage student admissions.
- Student information specialists have access to the most current student contact information from Salesforce within the Banner SaaS platform to effectively communicate with students and maintain accurate student records.
Also, this new integration improves security by ensuring that the data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and restricted access within the SaaS environment.
Streamline your data integrations with ABCloudz
As an Ellucian Service Partner, our company is happy to help higher education institutions adopt Ellucian Banner SaaS and take advantage of this cloud-based environment. Learn more about other Ellucian-based projects that our team delivered to universities worldwide. The ABCloudz experts know everything about the challenges that institutions face when adopting the cloud-based Ellucian SaaS platform. Our team has a successful track record with the integration and modernization projects, and you can trust us to build your success story. To get started, contact ABCloudz today!
