Overview

For best results, Student Success & Engagement requires ongoing maintenance in order to deliver new and exciting features that rely on accurate and up-to-date data extracted from third-party systems.

Historically, upgrading an institution to include new SIS data integration features was a laborious process, requiring multiple steps by both Watermark SS&E and institutional IT staff to install SIS data integration related upgrades.

However, with the release of the next gen version of SS&E Connect (eg. Connect), namely SS&E Accelerate (eg. Accelerate), it includes capabilities that allow new data integration logic to be written directly within SS&E Administrative screens so that new data fields/feeds are ready for the new data to import into SS&E once defined and extracted from the SIS.

Implementing Accelerate increases the value of Student Success & Engagement as it expedites implementation of new features that utilize new data fields/feeds imported from the SIS and expedites investigation of support tickets up to five times faster based on the enhanced SIS data integration logic.

In addition, while upgrading to Accelerate, this is a great opportunity to review the SIS Data Integration on all data feeds and take advantage of all current features in SS&E.

Institutional Requirements

SS&E Accelerate does require infrastructure changes, primarily more memory along with an installation by SS&E Retention staff of the new version and supporting software. The increase in memory for the SS&E Connect Virtual Machine is a precondition to the upgrade to SS&E Accelerate. The Institution will provide a virtual machine with the following:

1. A Windows 64 bit OS.  Windows must be Windows 2012 R2 64-bit or newer.
2. Minimum of 20GB of RAM.
3. Minimum of 40GB of disk space.
4. The server must be configured to use a global time service (NTP or like) to ensure its clock is consistent with SS&E . This is required by the security implementation.
5. Firewall rule to allow outbound access on port 22 (for SFTP)
6. Access via RDP (over VPN or other means) to the created virtual machine for SS&E Retention staff.
7. Access to the SIS and LMS data stores or APIs as supported.
8. Account must have local administrative rights so we can install programs with administrative privileges and use command prompt as an administrator. 

Scheduling

Once the requirements above have been installed by the institution, we will schedule the work. Each institution’s upgrade will take two to three weeks with minimum time from institution resources. During this time, SS&E service will not be interrupted.

Project Team

Each institution will need an IT lead to assist with access, an SIS expert (if there are data questions), and a Student Success colleague to assist with data validation.