Ask and you shall receive! Our product team has been working hard to build what so many of you have been asking for. We’re very excited to announce we are launching Slate integration! With this, student data will flow automatically from Concourse into your system once a student indicates their Interest in your offer. The goal of this integration is to make your experience more streamlined, and to get the students into your system as quickly as possible so that they can begin receiving admitted student communications from your institution.
Below we will guide you through the three steps required to integrate Concourse with Slate:
- Programs/Intake Information
- Slate Integration Guide/Data Dictionary
- Integration Key
Programs/Intake Information
Step one will be to provide us with your available Programs and Intake Dates. Please download our Concourse Slate Integration – Import Data spreadsheet to share your institution’s list of programs and available intake dates/terms of entry. You’ll need to download the spreadsheet to populate the information. The spreadsheet has two tabs (please don’t skip the second one!).
In the first tab, Intake Dates, you’ll list your available intake dates, and the date which you’d like those intakes to no longer be available. We’d only need start terms for your undergraduate programs.
In the second tab, Programs, you’ll list your available undergraduate programs. In the Name/Identifier column, you’d list your institution’s unique identifier for the program (MATH_BS), this should be how the program is listed in Slate. The following column, Description/Label, is where you share the text you’d like displayed on the front end (BS in Mathematics). Once you’ve populated both sheets, please return it to us so we can import the data into our system.
Slate Integration Guide/Data Dictionary
The next document you’ll need is our Slate Integration Guide. The guide includes general information about Concourse to provide context if you’re handing this off to your Slate Captain. At the end of the document you’ll find our Data Dictionary. This is the information your Slate Captain will use to map data as it’s moved from Concourse into your Slate system, ensuring that everything is pulling in to the correct fields. To assist with this mapping, we will link you to a sample file of student data and a zip file in Slate DIP format that includes supplemental documents.
Integration Key
Now we’re getting technical. This next step might sound like another language (because it sort of is), but it should be old hat for your Slate Captain. Once a student indicates interest, Concourse will post the student’s data and documents to an SFTP server which can be either by Concourse hosted or Slate hosted. The details on these file types are in the Guide.
In essence, the SFTP server is what we’ll use to exchange student information from our system to yours. In order for that to happen, your Slate Captain needs to exchange a key in order to facilitate SFTP Public Key authentication to the Concourse or Slate hosted SFTP Server. To complete this, we’ll need your Slate Captain to connect with our Head of Engineering, Manung Han (copied here), to set up the SFTP account. Once done, Concourse will initiate a test application to confirm successful connection.
To summarize, to active your Slate integration you must:
- Complete the Intakes/Programs form and return it to me.
- Use our Data Dictionary to map Concourse fields to your Slate fields (this is for your Slate Captain)
- Connect your Slate Captain with us so we can exchanges keys and create the SFTP account
We are happy to answer any questions you have and to offer our support throughout the integration process!