Overview
Phones and Addresses can be useful contact information to have on student, applicant, and prospect records. However, many institutions find it beneficial to limit the contact information that is imported into SS&E and/or limit phone and address types that are imported. This article contains basic information and best practices for implementing phone and address data.
Phone and Address Feeds
The SIS Import Definitions outlines the requirements for each of the following feeds.
The Phone Type and Address Type feeds are a list of the institution's phone and address types.
- These two lookup feeds (and others) populate the dropdowns throughout the system, especially in filters.
- These feeds also populate the Prospect Form fields.
- For each of these feeds, it is a good idea to filter your list of phone and address types to active, useful types.
- If your SIS includes contact information for relatives, supporters, etc., it may be beneficial to filter those contact types out of the phone and address lists if you do not want them to be used in SS&E.
- Phone Types are used by the system to determine which number to send SMS messages to. A Default SMS Phone Type will be designated (usually Cell or Mobile). If the person doesn't have a manually verified or SMS-enabled number, a phone with the default type will be used.
A person's phone and address records are imported on the Person Phone and Person Address feeds. These are the relationship between a person and a phone or address record. One person can have many phones and many addresses.
Unique Record IDs
Each record must have a unique ID, which is often a concatenation of the person ID, the phone type, and/or the phone number. Depending on the data integration method, this can be done in the source CSV/View or in the Accelerate configuration query.
Examples: 0123456.H or 0123456.CELL.9876543210.
- Even if the record has it's own unique ID, including the person ID in the record ID can aid in troubleshooting.
- Consider whether a person can have more than one phone of a given type at one time. E.g. can they have two valid/active CELL phones? If so, include the number in the ID.
- Do phone types for a number often change in the SIS? If so, including the phone type in the ID will cause a new record to be created when the type is changed. For example: 0123456.CELL.9876543210 becomes 0123456.HOME.9876543210. In SS&E there would be two unique records for the same number, each with different types.
- The same rules apply to person address. If there is a need for a person to have more than one address of a given type, include additional information to make the record unique.
Populations
Consider who should have phone and address records in SS&E. Most of the time, institutions prefer to only include phone and address records for students.
- Consider filtering the Person Phone and Person Address feeds to include only those with the student role. Depending on the data integration method, this can be done in the source CSV/View or in the Accelerate configuration query.
- One exception to this is Office or Campus phones - it can be helpful to display staff and faculty office phones on their records.
- When considering filters also consider staff who are also students. Should these individuals have their addresses/phone numbers in the system? Keep in mind that in some cases a staff member’s phone number may be visible to students in SS&E. For example, a student can often see their advisor’s phone number when they login to the system. As a result, it may be a good idea to only import campus/office phone numbers for staff and teachers even if they are also a student.
Deletion
There are different methods of deleting certain types of data.
Person Phone records can be deleted from SS&E using the AllIds deletion method. See more information about SIS Data Deletion Integration Configuration and Troubleshooting.
Person Address records can be inactivated and removed from the SS&E UI. To do this, the active field must be set to 'false'.
See more information about Data Feed Actions.