DON'T "MAKE DO" WITH
THE OLD SNAPSHOT
GENERATOR, "SPEND" TIME
IMPROVING THINGS WITH
THE NEW SIS INTEGRATION
FRAMEWORK
Mark Hodgson
New College
Durham
TODAYS PRESENTATION
 Presentation – 15mins
 Q&A – 10mins
REASON FOR CHANGE AT NCD
 Self Hosted – Blackboard 5 -> Blackboard 9.1 SP4, Snapshot
Controller
 Moved to Managed Hosting – Blackboard 9.1 SP9, Integration
Framework
FEED FILE SETUP
 7 feed files:







Students (approx 8300 rows)
Staff (approx 780 rows)
Schools (11 rows)
Courses (approx 760 rows)
Course to school mapping (approx 760 rows)
Student to course mapping (approx 20250 rows)
Staff to course mapping (approx 38200 rows)
SIS INTEGRATION FRAMEWORK
 New integration features not covered:
 Institutional Hierarchy
 Terms
DATA INTEGRATIONS
 Will be using SIS Integrations option and the Data Sources
option.
DATA SOURCES
 Used to group data together
INTEGRATIONS
INTEGRATIONS
INTEGRATIONS
INTEGRATIONS
INTEGRATIONS – ADVANCED CONFIG
INTEGRATIONS – ADVANCED CONFIG
INTEGRATIONS – HTTP INFORMATION
 Details needed to send the feed files to the VLE is on this
screen
 3 Operation types – Store, Complete Refresh and Delete
SENDING FEED FILES TO VLE
Via cURL
/bin/curl -k -v -H "Content-Type:text/plain"
-u <username>:<password> --data-binary
@'<feedfile path>' --url <endpoint>
Via manual upload in the GUI
This can be done from the integration screen, choose file
to upload, the type of data and the operation type.
CONCLUSIONS AND FINDINGS
Pros
 More knowledge of the whole process
 More granular control
 Functionality out-of-the-box
 Cons
 Time - snapshot (5-10mins), integration (50mins)
Q&A
 Any questions?
 New College Durham Contact details
Mark Hodgson
mark.hodgson@newdur.ac.uk
George Wraith
george.wraith@newdur.ac.uk