Riva Integration Server is brilliant! It has allowed our students' calendars to be synchronized from SCT PowerCAMPUS to their GroupWise accounts. The information is now available in a single location. Riva is considered an essential service by staff, faculty and students.
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Riva Integration Server SDK
Student management systems are the lifeblood of education systems. Similar to ERPs and CRMs in the corporate world, they are used by faculty and staff to manage and track course and exam schedules, admissions, academic plans, student records, grades and other information. And just like ERPs and CRMs, integrating information and workflow processes between systems is critical. For today's "connected" student, having access to their GroupWise calendar information on their mobile devices is quickly becoming an expectation.
Landmark College is a fully accredited liberal arts college in Putney, Vermont, designed exclusively for students with dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD) and other learning disabilities. To help enhance student success, advisors needed a simple way to confirm students' availability for appointments. Students wanted their course and exam schedule in GroupWise and they wanted their calendars synchronized to their mobile devices.
"Our advising department needed a simpler way to confirm students' availability for meetings," said Kirt Sorensen, Manager of Network Services at Landmark College. "Prior to implementing Riva Integration Server from Omni last semester, advising needed to conduct manual busy searches by checking three different calendars. When advisors needed to add more than one student to a meeting, scheduling appointments became very difficult. Scheduling required that calendars always reflect any class changes and be up-to-date in terms of scheduling information, without assuming that all students immediately make changes to their GroupWise calendars.
"There was no native calendar synchronization available between GroupWise and SCT PowerCAMPUS," continued Sorensen. "We considered the costs and benefits of developing our own custom-built integration solution or seeking a quicker and more cost-effective integration solution from the GroupWise partner community."
"As a long-time Omni customer, we inquired about whether Riva Integration Server could be used to integrate the two systems," continued Sorensen. "We have been very pleased with the results."
Riva Integration Server is a server-side collaboration integration platform that enables organizations to automatically push information from one system to another based on pre-defined policies; for example, in this case, to automatically synchronize students' and staff's class schedules and appointments to GroupWise. Riva's integration framework for GroupWise and Exchange supports SAP, CRM, HR and student information systems. Administrators can leverage the Riva SDK to build custom connectors for SQL-based applications.
"While we had the technical expertise in-house to develop the SIS integration," said Sorensen, "we considered it more advantageous to implement Riva Integration Server to save on time and reduce the initial and long-term costs of developing and maintaining such a solution."
"Riva satisfied our immediate calendaring and scheduling integration needs for GroupWise," said Jarrett Hood, Database Applications Specialist at Landmark College, "and it also provides great flexibility for integration requirements we may have in future such as pushing out holiday schedules, populating GroupWise calendars based on custom databases, integrating with ERP and financial systems, and scheduling actions such as mail send-outs in SCT PowerCAMPUS."
"At Landmark College, we use NotifyLink to synchronize GroupWise information to mobile devices. A nice value-add of having Riva and NotifyLink is the ability for student information system information to be synchronized down to GroupWise and to users' mobile devices."
"The calendar and appointment integration Riva delivers between our student information system and GroupWise is now considered a must-have service," said Sorensen. "Riva Integration Server is brilliant! It has allowed our students' calendars to be synchronized from SCT PowerCAMPUS to their GroupWise accounts. The information is now available in a single location."
"The advisor who initially requested the integration is absolutely thrilled. Once the advising department started to reap the benefits of the integration, Student Affairs also got excited about the opportunity to quickly and easily schedule meetings with staff, faculty and students using the integrated solution."
"Omni's technical and support team have been great to work with," said Sorensen. "We highly recommend Riva Integration Server to other universities and colleges that need to integrate GroupWise or Exchange calendar information with their student management system."
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