Interfolio Database Migration

Watermark Migration Services are offered for an additional fee and can be purchased via your Service Package through the Watermark Academy. For questions on pricing or timelines, please contact your Client Success Manager.

Interfolio Faculty Activity Reporting or FAR (formerly Faculty 180) is an alternative product for tracking faculty activities. Watermark has developed a standardized process to transfer Interfolio Faculty Activity Reporting data into Faculty Success with minimal effort on your part. This process is specific for the Interfolio Faculty Activity Reporting module and not inclusive of the Review Promotion and Tenure module.

Requesting A Data Migration

To start the data migration process, visit our Watermark Academy offering for Watermark's Migration Services.  Our Services team will work with you on scheduling a tentative date to begin the project. If you are in implementation and planning a data migration as part of your initial go live, please discuss with your Project Manager so that we can coordinate accordingly.

Pre-Import Activities

To start the import process, you will be asked to supply the Interfolio Faculty Activity Reporting backup data file in Comma Separated Value (*.csv) format and submit the file as a General work request. You can get this file self-service via the Interfolio admin portal. Note that the file should be the final version of your Faculty 180 data, after your institution has discontinued using Interfolio.

Best Practice:

• Before sending Watermark the back up data file you need to determine a cut over date and think about your internal communications to your faculty and staff about the change.
• You need to ensure you have deactivated all faculty users from Interfolio so that they can not add additional data. This can be done via a request to the Interfolio help team.
• You should NOT expect to keep both systems live at the same time.

All users that you want to be imported should be created before we may begin the process. View our guide on Creating and Managing User Accounts in Bulk to prepare user accounts for the data import. Course data should also be excluded from the migration and should come directly from your SIS (or system of records) of what courses are offered and what faculty taught what courses during which time period.

Note: Interfolio data may contain inactive faculty members who would not be loaded from your HR system of record as active users. You should determine with your implementation team how you wish to treat this historical data. Based on your use case (annual review, accreditation) we recommend only bringing over what is absolutely required.

Prior to importing Interfolio data you should also review your back up data file to determine what data you wish to bring over. We recommend not bringing over any inactive sections within Interfolio. We also do not recommend bringing over data that may not be reliable.

Import Process

Once you have completed the pre-import activities, you will submit your backup data file using a work request. In the request, with the backup data file you should identify what sections from Interfolio should not be imported.

During the migration process, Watermark will make a limited number of revisions to your activities database in order to accommodate values found within your Interfolio data, such as updating your list of degrees earned or updating drop-down fields. In general, however, the goal of the conversion process is not to recreate the Interfolio structure within our software, but rather to transition data into the base structure that we have developed for our clients and which we believe provides the best starting point for a Faculty Success implementation.

The import process itself can take around two weeks (subject to change based on the time of year and current workload), and all communication will occur via work requests.

Post-Import Cleanup

Interfolio and Watermark’s Faculty Success structure data differently which means it is imperative for our partners to carefully quality check the data after migration. We will do everything we can to carefully map each element into the correct and corresponding field in your Watermark system. To validate your migrated data, Watermark system administrators should identify several faculty member profiles to review and ensure all data transferred correctly. As an administrator, you can also run out of the box reports such as the Vita Report or Export Data to review the results of the transfer. All feedback can be provided by work request.

We carefully identify the tables and columns which can be mapped or converted to Faculty Accomplishments, as well as the most appropriate destinations for these data elements. This sometimes involves complex logic and is not always a simple 1-to-1 mapping. Although this logic is as accurate and complete as possible, some level of post-migration data cleanup is frequently necessary, since the way the data was entered into Interfolio may not have been sufficient to fully populate all fields in each Faculty Success destination record. Data clean-up is rare but may include Watermark parsing or concatenating some fields.

The following table outlines some common types of data and the Faculty Accomplishments screen on which they will most likely be mapped:

Due to the ability to customize your Interfolio system, your technical consultant will evaluate your Interfolio data backup to determine the best fit for each field of data.

Your technical consultant will be able to share with you the results of dynamic mapping.