If you have ever tried to house thousands of students at once, you know the real problem is not the number of beds, it is the data that decides who is allowed to sleep in them. Room eligibility lives in Ellucian Banner, room assignments live in a separate accommodation system, and every autumn those two worlds must agree on the same list of students.
As Ellucian expands its SaaS platform across Europe, one of the key goals is to make that agreement boring and predictable. Instead of asking each institution to reinvent its own integration, Ellucian is investing in reusable, SaaS ready patterns that speak the language of Data Connect, Ethos, and modern APIs. Our team at ABCloudz was invited to design one of these patterns, a repeatable integration that keeps Banner SaaS in sync with a third-party room management system, including outbound eligibility data and inbound term time addresses.
To shape this integration, we worked with a university in the United Kingdom that already had a reliable automation in its on-premise Banner environment. Their scripts knew exactly which applicants had accepted an offer, which programs and campuses they belonged to, and when it was safe to open room booking. The challenge was not to invent new business rules, it was to rebuild the same trusted logic inside Ellucian’s SaaS tools so that it could run securely in the cloud and later be reused by other European institutions.
This story walks through how we translated that legacy accommodation flow into a clean, API based integration between Banner SaaS and a room management system, ready to be adopted by any institution that wants its students to move from offer to room key without spreadsheets or guesswork.
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What the original accommodation flow looked like
Before moving to Banner SaaS, the university already had a working automation that supported its accommodation process. The logic lived entirely inside the on-prem Banner environment, where direct access to student records made everything straightforward. As soon as an applicant changed status or accepted an offer, Banner could feed that information into the accommodation system through scheduled extracts. The room management platform received a nightly CSV with personal details, program information, decision outcomes, and everything needed to determine who was allowed to book a room.
The flow was simple because the on-prem environment allowed it to be simple. Banner generated export files using internal jobs, the accommodation system consumed those files, and staff stepped in only to review occasional mismatches. Term time addresses also traveled in the opposite direction. After a student booked housing, the accommodation system produced an inbound file that Banner picked up and wrote directly into the correct address tables.
The architecture worked for years, but it was built around capabilities that exist only in an on-prem setup. Direct table queries, custom SQL, and file exchanges tied to local servers could not follow the institution into a cloud environment. Once the migration to SaaS became the target, this original automation had to be reimagined through Data Connect pipelines and Ethos APIs while preserving every rule the university depended on.
Rebuilding the accommodation integration for SaaS
Turning the legacy accommodation flow into a SaaS ready integration started with one task, making every decision rule from the on-prem world work inside Ellucian’s cloud tools. The university’s eligibility logic touched almost every corner of Banner, from admission decisions and offer dates to program details, campuses, modes of study, and disability information. Our team analyzed the full process, broke it down into user stories, and mapped each rule to the modern Ethos and Data Connect model.
With that groundwork in place, the new architecture came together around three coordinated pipelines.
The first two handle outbound eligibility extracts. One performs a full pull of all required student, admission, program, and medical information through Ethos. The other listens for Ethos Change Notifications and retrieves only the updated records. Both pipelines apply the same eligibility logic, transform and format fields, generate a clean CSV file, and deliver it to either SFTP or S3 for the accommodation system. Logs for each run are captured automatically.
The third pipeline flows in the opposite direction. After a student completes a room booking, the accommodation system generates a CSV file with updated term time address details. Data Connect reads that inbound file from S3, parses and validates each row, matches Banner records, prepares update payloads, and writes the new addresses back to Banner SaaS using Ethos endpoints. All successes and errors are logged so staff can review or rerun updates without manual intervention.
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Results and impact
The finished integration delivered exactly what the project set out to achieve: a fully SaaS native accommodation workflow that preserves every business rule the university depended on while eliminating everything that made the old on-prem setup brittle. There is no database access, no custom shell scripts, and no invisible logic hiding inside the system. Each data read goes through Ethos, every transformation runs inside Data Connect, and all outputs land in clear, auditable success and error logs.
For the university, this means predictable nightly eligibility files, accurate address updates after room bookings, and a pipeline they can trust without manual checks or guesswork. The entire process is transparent, cloud aligned, and easy to maintain.
For Ellucian, the impact is even bigger. The integration was built not just as a one off solution but as a reusable pattern that any institution in Europe can adopt as they move their accommodation processes to Banner SaaS. The eligibility logic, the inbound address update flow, the Ethos based orchestration, all of it was designed to serve as a repeatable blueprint.