OpenApply integration

Finalsite offers a data integration with the OpenApply admissions system. This integration pulls student and contact data from OpenApply and populates them in Finalsite in the “OpenApply - Students & Contacts” role. It also creates groups based on relationships and admissions statuses to facilitate communication from the Messages and Workflows modules. The data we synchronize includes contact, demographic, relationship, and admissions status information.

In this Article

• OpenApply integration sync
• Setup and deployment process
• Managing OpenApply users at Finalsite
  • OpenApply best practices

OpenApply integration sync

The integration will run hourly to update student information. Nightly, a “full sync” will run, which will update all parent/contact records. This limit on parent updates is due to the functionality of the Apply API and ensuring the student admissions status stays up to date hourly (as that is the most important piece of data to stay in sync).

Setup and deployment process

In order to set up the data in your instance of OpenApply, here is the process:

1. Enable the API and create the appropriate credentials in OpenApply. Your integration specialist will give you specific instructions for this.
2. Once we have access, we will pull data from OpenApply into a clone site so it can be reviewed and the data mapping modified as needed. We make a number of assumptions on the data mapping, and that is detailed here. The data mapping is very flexible and customizable, so we can modify the behavior specifically to your needs except for the admissions status (as that is the key field for Group/Workflow functionality). We also have access to Custom Fields that are created in OpenApply, but since these are fields specific to your OpenApply instance, we don’t do anything with them by default.
3. Tell us which enrollment years you would like us to include in the integration.
4. Once access is confirmed and data-mapping decisions are made, the integration is ready to be deployed on your live site.

In the process of creating the integration, a number of system-level groups are created to facilitate Workflows/Messages functionality based on the data coming from OpenApply into Finalsite. These groups should not (and cannot) be edited. These groups ensure that Workflows/Messages has access to up-to-date admissions statuses of OpenApply applicants and their contacts.

Managing OpenApply users at Finalsite

We do not expose the users created from the integration for manual management in Constituent Manager, because these users are intended for communication purposes only via Messages/Workflows. These users should not be given accounts to log into for portal access, for example. Users who exist in other roles in Finalsite will not be linked to these users (e.g., a teacher who is already in Finalsite who is also the parent of an applicant will not have the existing account updated via the integration). It is also expected that these users would be purged each “admissions season.”