About Mentis® integration

Student Information System (SIS) integration helps administrators integrate course and enrollment data with Mentis®. There are key advantages to using the Student Information System (SIS) integration to pass data to Mentis to automatically populate and update your system like reduction in manual data entry, improving the integrity of data through relying on authoritative data stores and delegation of responsibility to let users update the systems that they are responsible for.

Integration types

Mentis delivers Banner SIS integration with the following integration types:

UI Import Tool: This is a manual integration where ready-made templates can be populated manually or automatically from SIS and uploaded manually into Mentis. You can determine which users from organization need access to perform this function.
(Popular) Snapshot Integration (Flat-file): This allows for Mentis to read and load data automatically without any manual intervention directly from files (flat file) that may be published at a predetermined secure location.
Web-service based integration: This is a fully automated option where Mentis can directly query and read information that it is authorized for directly from your SIS.
Web-service based integration with central institutional repository: This is also a completely automated option and allows us to integrate with your SIS via some other directory system (e.g. Cedar, OrgSync etc.) that you may already be using to consolidate and share information between campus systems.

Planning

Inknowledge works with your stakeholders in the integration planning process to leverage input from your SIS Director, Mentis application owner and other campus operations to ensure a successful integration. A successful integration requires knowledge of SIS configuration options, the selection of the Mentis Integration type that meets your requirements, and an understanding of the data requirements for the integration type.

Integration Candidates

Integration target in Mentis is a function of the apps that are being subscribed to. From SIS, usual integration candidates include the following:

Course and Class information: This provides details of courses that are being taught in any given semester. This includes unique SIS course id, course subject, number, name, description and the details of the Semester and Session in which the course is being offered. These are then used to allow Mentis users to select courses to be added to their profile (Profile app), or affiliate them manually to programs (E-Learning Compliance app). They can also be used for specifying courses that are associated with service learning projects (Community Service Learning).
Faculty course affiliation: This is used to auto-populate a faculty's profile with the course that they are teaching in the past, current or future semesters. If the syllabus is available in SIS can be also included or then manually added by faculty (syllabus management in the profiles app in Mentis).
Program information: A list of all programs can be imported or synchronized from SIS into Mentis for managing their state authorization (E-Learning Compliance app). The course can again be automatically associated with these programs if their association is available in the SIS.
Student enrollment numbers: Student enrollment details of summary numbers by semester-session can be captured from SIS for reporting and decision-making purpose for state authorization compliance and planning the institution's business strategy around the process.

Student Enrollment Information for ELC

Student Enrollment integration in ELC allows for automatic report generation and enables other advanced features with ELC.

There are three inter-related data sets required for this integration.

Student Enrollment Information (ELCStudentEnrollment)
Class Information (Class)
Term Information (Term)

Please see the linked schema for the information required in each of these datasets. The datasets can be uploaded to a predetermined secure location using a username and password provisioned for your institution.

Each dataset should be a separate text file, with the prefix <yyyy_mm_dd_hh_mm_datasetname>.txt and records should be separated by tab (\t).

See sample files below for more information.

ELCStudentInformation Sample File

Class Information Sample File

Term Information Sample File

Mapping for files to database is explained as below,

Term File Mapping