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Data Migrations are a Professional Service offering which can be done for an additional fee. To inquire about pricing, please reach out to your Client Success Manager. |
Interfolio is an alternative product for tracking faculty activities, primarily used by some business schools. Watermark has developed a standardized process to transfer Interfolio Faculty180 data into Faculty Success with minimal effort on your part. Through this process, users are created and data stored in Interfolio are transferred in one step, greatly reducing both your administrative overhead and the burden of data entry on your business faculty. Before we start the import process, a tentative date will be mutually agreed upon.
Import Process
To start the import process, you will be asked to supply the Interfolio Faculty 180 database in Comma Separated Value (*.csv) format and submit the file as a General work request. Note that the file should be the final version of your Faculty 180 data, after your institution has discontinued using Interfolio.
In addition to providing us with your data, please specify if there is any data we should not transfer into Faculty Success. For example, we skip importing course data and recommend importing scheduled teaching data from your authoritative student information database at a later date, which may be a more accurate source for this information.
All users that you want to be imported should be created as Faculty Success users before we can start the import process.
During the migration process, we will make a small number of revisions to your activities database in order to accommodate values found within your Faculty 180 data, such as updating your list of departments or degrees earned. In general, however, the goal of the conversion process is not to recreate the Faculty 180 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.
Post-Import Cleanup
Interfolio and Faculty Success structure data in different ways, but Faculty Success generally has more fields since it captures data at a more granular level. We have carefully identified 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; as a result, a field-level mapping document is not available. 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.
The following table outlines some common types of data and the Faculty Accomplishments screen on which they will most likely be mapped:
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Interfolio Faculty 180 |
Faculty Accomplishments |
| Scholarly Contributions and Creative Productions, books, chapters, journals, materials, conference preceding, other |
Publications with the correct type (book, journals, etc.) |
| Scholarly Contributions and Creative Productions, Presentations | Presentations |
| Honors & Awards | Awards & Honors |
| Scholarly Contributions and Creative Productions, Review | Professional Service |
| Scholarly Contributions and Creative Productions, Institutional Committees and Other Institutional Services | University Service |
| Advising | Yearly Advising Summary |
| Grants | Contracts & Grants |
| Licensures & Certifications | Licensures & Certifications |
Based on our review of the software, most Interfolio tables contain a column labeled "description", and we typically transfer this into our text area with a similar label. However, Faculty Success contains numerous fields to collect specific information, and corresponding fields often do not exist in Interfolio. Therefore, faculty using Interfolio were often forced to enter details about their activities into the general "description" field. Since our data collection screens do contain more specific fields, faculty now have better places to track that information and it may be valuable to move some details from a text area into these fields. This will allow all reports -- not just the Vita -- to more accurately structure and format information about the faculty member's contributions and activities. The best way to understand which data were imported to this generic "description" field rather than a more granular field is either to analyze the Vita (Conversion) output, which includes these text area fields, or to use Self-Service Reports to output the data in "Description" and "Comments" fields.
While some post-conversion data cleanup is typically needed on the university’s end, we frequently receive comments from migrated clients that indicate they are very satisfied with the way the conversion is handled and the amount of data that is transferred.
As always, your Client Success Manager is here to help with any questions about the Interfolio migration process or the post-migration cleanup, so please feel free to reach out regarding any specific issues.