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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. |
Sedona is an alternative product for tracking faculty activities, primarily used by some business schools. Since Sedona clients have limited ability to customize the software, the structure of a Sedona database is consistent across clients. Watermark has developed a standardized process to transfer Sedona data into Faculty Success with minimal effort on your part. Through this process, users are created and data stored in Sedona are transferred in one step, greatly reducing both your administrative overhead and the burden of data entry on your business faculty.
Import Process
To start the import process, you will be asked to supply the entire Sedona database in Microsoft Access (*.mdb) format and submit the file as a General work request. Note that the file should be the final version of your Sedona data, after your institution has discontinued using Sedona.
In addition to providing us with your Sedona database, please specify if there is any data we should not transfer into Faculty Success. For example, we recommend ignoring course data from Sedona and instead importing scheduled teaching data from your authoritative student information database at a later date, which may be a more accurate source for this information.
Sedona imports are considered non-standard work requests that typically take longer than 10 business days to complete. Before we start the import process, a tentative date will be mutually agreed upon.
By default, we will create user accounts for every individual faculty member listed in the Sedona database, and we will use the first portion of each user's email address as the username. If you know that you intend to use a completely different username scheme within Faculty Success, you can provide us with a mapping document showing how email addresses within Sedona should be mapped to the usernames you wish to create.
During the migration process, we will make a small number of revisions to your activities database in order to accommodate values found within your Sedona 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 Sedona structure within our software, but rather to transition data from the Sedona data structure 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.
Once your Sedona data has been successfully imported, your Administrator will be notified that a custom report named "Vita (conversion)" has also been set up for Administrator and Limited Administrator security roles. This report is an alternate form of our base Vita and is intended to aid you in reviewing the Sedona import. For this reason, it contains many of the common screens and fields into which Sedona data was imported, including text areas such as "Description" that appear on many screens but are not included in the regular Vita.
Post-Import Cleanup
Sedona and Faculty Success structure data in different ways, but Faculty Success generally has more screens and fields since it captures data at a more granular level. In the numerous Sedona conversions we have processed for other clients, we have thoroughly identified the tables and columns which can be mapped or converted to Faculty Success, as well as the most appropriate destinations for these data elements. This 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 Sedona may not have been sufficient to fully populate all fields in each Faculty Success destination record.
Based on our review of the software, most Sedona 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 Sedona. Therefore, faculty using Sedona 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 query and display information about the faculty member's historical 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 Ad Hoc Reports to output the data in "Description" and "Comments" questions.
While a bit of post-conversion data cleanup is typically needed on the university’s end, we frequently receive comments from converted 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 Sedona migration process or the post-migration cleanup, so please feel free to reach out regarding any specific issues.
