Getting Started

Welcome to the documentation for International Application Service (IAS) SIS Integration. If you are not an existing customer or would like more information, please contact OCAS.

If this is your first time here, see the Overview article. If you are ready to start development to integrate with IAS, see Integration Approaches.

Overview

The SIS Integration capabilities of IAS respects the fact that each college handles international applicants differently and can have significantly different processes even from their own domestic applicants process. Ultimately, each student be it domestic or international needs to end up in the college’s student information system. How and when that happens is entirely up to the college.

The SIS Integration tools are also platform agnostic and offer a means to get international applicant data to the college but they do not directly connect to your SIS product (be it Ellucian Banner, Oracle PeopleSoft or custom). This “last mile” of taking event data and loading it in your SIS’ data tables will be work for the College’s IT team. OCAS will fully support the tools provided in the SIS integration toolkit as well as helping the college understand the IAS event models, however OCAS does not claim to be experts in the SIS system used at your college or how it is integrated into your colleges international admissions processes.

SIS Integration enables the college to manage much or all the admissions processes in their SIS. Application data from IAS is sent to the college as changes are made, and admissions data is sent back to IAS from the college as changes are made in the SIS. Generally, integration is done in place of managing admissions decisions in the IAS (college can only make admissions decisions in one place or the other)

Comparison of International and Domestic Applicant Data Exchange

Receiving data from the OCAS IAS solution is very different than the OCAS Coltrane Domestic solution and does not conform to the Coltrane flat-file or record type solution for domestic.

	Domestic (Coltrane)	International
Receive/Send Frequency	Once a Day (24hr)	Near real time (~1min)
Reconcile Frequency	Once a Day (24hr)	Colleges Discretion
Persistence	Flat File	Relational DB Table
Content Format	XML (was custom)	JSON (xml optional)
Behavior	Transactional in nature (24 hr.)	Event driven design (replay)
Transmission	SFTP (flat files)	HTTPS (through OCAS Clients)

Each event represents a change in application state within IAS that the college may be interested in reflecting in their SIS. It is not required for a college to consume each type of event, in all circumstances. For example, depending on the college’s processes, the Application Update event may only be ingested into the SIS. A single SIS event can only be one way: inbound to the college or outbound from the college.

An Inbound Event is information from OCAS IAS being sent to the College’s SIS.

An Outbound Event is information from the College’s SIS being sent to OCAS IAS.

An event triggered in IAS is based on a change in application data and will be available for the college to consume if the college is configured to receive that event type. While the event itself describes the changes made, the data inside the event will not contain the full record details of the record that changed.

When integrating IAS data into the SIS it is important to consider order of processing of Inbound and Outbound events. It is not advisable to have different schedules for consumption of inbound events and transmission of outbound events. For each execution of the sync, the college should retrieve/consume/process all pending inbound events, followed by sending any pending outbound messages. This eliminates the chances of state-mismatch of data, particularly for admissions decisions.

College, Applicant Decisions, Process States and related Event Flow

The following diagram provides an overview of the events exchanged between IAS and SIS through the international admissions process to enable synchronization of record states in both systems.

Integration Approaches

IAS SIS integration is a modern, event-based messaging solution that at its core provides a secure, Web API to facilitate two-way communication. As an alternative to accessing the IAS API directly, OCAS has built windows services (Sender/Receiver clients) that can be used to push and pull Event data to a local staging database.

OCAS recommends leveraging the IAS API directly to get the most out of the IAS integration capabilities.

Depending on your college's technology stack and development team you may have a preference integration approach taken. For teams familiar with writing code to invoke APIs, direct communication with the IAS API is recommended. If your team is stronger writing direct database queries then using the sender and receiver clients that connect to the IAS API on your behalf may be your preference.

This wiki is set up to guide you through which pages you should read in order to develop your integration solution. As part of the IAS onboarding process and as you begin development, the IAS technical team can be engaged for additional guidance and to answer any technical questions as needed. Please reach out to OCAS' Customer Success team if you would like technical assistance.

Comparison of the Integration Approaches

	IAS API	Sender/Receiver Clients
Experience with Consuming an API	Required	Not Required
Experience with databases and query languages (PL/SQL or T/SQL)	Not Required	Required
Frequency of synchronization	Near Real-Time	Scheduled/batch processing
Exchanging Program Catalogue Data	Supported	Not Supported

Will you communicate directly with the IAS API (recommended)?

• If yes, then please continue with Direct to API documentation
• If no, then continue with Sender and Receiver Clients documentation

Requesting API Access

In order to access any of the IAS API environments you will need to have been issued credentials that your solution will use to request a Bearer token for request authorization.

OCAS will provide you information about the location of the OIDS and credentials for development purposes in a separate e-mail. If you do not yet have this information please have a representative from your college reach out to the OCAS Customer Success team.