Alright, so it's two o'clock. So we have a fair amount to cover. So we'll go ahead and get started. So we're recording this and we'll send you the recording and the slide deck as well.
So it's a pretty small group. So feel free to unmute yourself and ask questions or type into type into chat. If you have questions as well.
Presenting with me is Gail Polanski from the Sunni shared library services team as well.
So,
What we're going to be focusing on today is loading and synchronization of the si es files into Alma, we're not going to get into the configuration of the banner application.
Created by secrets because SICA supports that application. They do a fantastic job of helping with configuration changes, etc.
So we're going to focus more on troubleshooting and giving you the tools to go back to seek us or back to your IT department if you're in the library and ask for adjustments or to fix issues, things like that.
Alright, so we'll go ahead and get started. So there's some FAQs and documentation that will go through step by step how to load the si es file.
And then there's some really good documentation from actually Bruce as well. The one I find myself using the most is the data dictionary for user tags, mostly because a fair amount of the work that Gail and I have been doing with campuses is just looking at
You know, XML problems with with tags structures or data in those tags and the data dictionary is a good way to see what is allowed by Alma because almost very strict in that regard.
A quick statement on support for us is loading. So in late September September I think was 25th 26 we moved from implementation to support so that
The Sunni team. We also moved into support. I think we've we've tried to make this known, but we've not necessarily trumpeted it too much.
But the there are a couple of exceptions to the switch to support so
Even if you don't have an extended support agreement with Sunni or the Sunni shared library services will continue to at least for the next six months support you with troubleshooting and setting up si s integration, we've continued to do that for anybody who's asked us
So just submit a live answers request. If you need any help with that. And if we've already started working with you will continue to work with you until the process is working well and you're comfortable with taking taking on the loading and and maintenance of the process yourself.
So the one limitation is that we won't be the ones who are going to do the complex data cleanup, what we will do is, will provide you with reports and
pointers on how to conduct that data cleanup, but we won't actually go in and fix the users for you. That's, that's something we'll ask you to do.
But we'll give you a lot of guidance on how to do that.
So after six months what we plan on supporting is anything to do with s FTP server so that integration server where you have to place the XML the zip XML files and then
We'll continue to communicate and collaborate with seek us on story home improvements and adjustments and they just reached out to us on
You know, the next phase of adjustments that they'd like to make. And we need to do some investigation. Before we move forward. But there will be some some improvements coming in the near future.
And then what we will also do is review enhancements that are related to user management in Alma and potentially even the S is loading and then we'll provide training documentation and communication.
One of those recent enhancements, is the ability to do SAML self registration, which is helpful if you're using SAML for authentication.
And you you know somebody tries to login to primo and maybe you know you only loaded your si s last week and they're not in your user database yet.
That this SAML self registration will allow them to create an on the fly user record that can be used to authenticate and and go into Alma and primo
We're working through some of the mapping issues with that right now. And as soon as we're comfortable with with that will start training and and helping others to configure this if that's something that they want to do.
So, I, I'm sure this is this is
You know, something that most of you realize, but I just wanted to kind of pointed out.
Again here as well that user data is extremely important and Alma and primo not that it wasn't important analysis, but I think, you know, you could do a lot of different things in Alice without having a complete full less full list of users.
You know, a lot of a lot of campuses tried to keep their users pretty well in sync. But I think it's extremely important that you focus on a very high percentage of your current users that they're in all men primo and that they have all of the data that they need to authenticate.
One of the big reasons is that the primo and the link resolved or options. The that that those are reliant upon someone being able to sign in and having user data there. So,
Whether they can request something via resource sharing or they have access to a specific collection.
That can be dependent on their user group. So it's extremely important that that you're using your user data is as accurate as you can make it.
Going forward and primo offers a lot of different capabilities as much more than the alpha pack much more than EDS
And a lot of this requires that you sign into an account. So that's why we want to, you know, continue to to, you know, give attention to and show you how to make loading user data as accurate as you possibly can and get as many of your users in as possible.
So I'm going to turn it over to Gail to to work through the, the next few slides and Gail, just let me know when you want me to advance
Okay. Um, so one of the things that I always want like to point out to people, the differences between how Alma loads patrons and how all of this because I took some getting used to, at least for me.
I think the biggest thing is the the data. The missing data that if, if, if a piece of data is missing from your XML file.
It will wipe out the existing data in the in the amo record which is very different than all of our was a lot more forgiving. It just updated and if it wasn't in the file, it just left it alone.
The, the match point was also tricky and all of you had to have it in a particular place in the in the final
Whereas in in Alma, it does. It's not even mentioned in the file, it's you choose the match point when you run the job. It's part of the the job itself. So you can run the same file multiple times with different match points. So that's a, that's a cool thing.
Another negative thing is that is no preview mode. So there's no running it in non update mode, getting a report and seeing what the results would be if you ran it
You can you see there's only one option is to run it, which is why looking at the file very carefully before. Before you run it is really important.
And another another differences, the duplicate identifiers in all of you could load the same and lot of chemistry doing this they love Kansas over loading like the banner ID in different ID types.
In the same for the same user. And that was acceptable analysis and it is not in normal. So that's another thing to be aware of. So
Again, and it won't load the record if if it's a duplicate it just won't load it. So that's something to make sure I think most of the campuses now have have
Figured that out but just wanted to mention that. Okay.
So,
So the, the XML file then has to be zipped it has to be in a format in a zip format that has a zip file name extension. So it can't be Jesus. It can't be sevens of
It has to be a dozen zip format. Some of those programs can load it in the zip file format. So you just have to make sure that you choose the correct
Format and so once you once you zip it then it goes on the F s FTP server.
Those that I've configured the FTP server for all the campuses. So you shouldn't have to do anything with the FTP definitions and normal and it has to go in the sister actor, et si es directory under the Dropbox.
You can you can include multiple files in a new can include multiple files in a single zip file as long as there are different users in each file. So if you have a file of faculty in a file of students.
You can sip them into one file, but just be warned that if there's a user that's in the same user with the same identifiers in both files that user. There'll be
It is a won't load or it will only load one and if you might love the wrong one. You might want the faculty one to a little bit might look the student one. So just, just be careful of that.
Just a reminder that if you're not sure how to access the S FTP server, it uses the same credentials that you used for you, our sandbox. And if you don't have that. Feel free to let us know and we'll send it to you.
So as I said before, any, any data that is not an XML file will, will any data that is an XML file will overwrite the data and normal and vice versa.
The opposite is that even if it's not so it's missing if I'd say you your file does not have an email address, but it had it in the armor record it will erase it will override the records of email address in the OMA records. So you really want to make sure that that data is in there.
And if there are. I know, I know I had suggested TO SOME CAMPUSES THAT
That they maintain their they all have system number just for troubleshooting and that but that had to be protected. So if you want, we're maintaining if you want to maintain I think Hudson Valley was one example.
Do you have to ask. Actually, you have to open a Salesforce case and asking slavers to mark that as an internal
ID so that it won't get updated from the, from the SIS load.
But, but just talking about the data that is missing. Another thing that we see sometimes a file is missing patron expiration dates. That's another. That's another problem. So if your file does not have expiration dates.
It will wipe out the existing one. And then your patients won't be able to do things in because they will be expired.
And I yeah so to just make sure that your file has has that information.
So when you actually run the job you go into configuration and general and integration profiles and when you select the student information system.
Profile when you go to the as you see here at the action tab. This page I find very confusing, and I wish.
polshek sleepers would reorganize it because there are about four different run buttons on this page. And some people sometimes get confused. But what what you want is the one under the synchronized section.
And what I've tried to do as, as I've been logging in. I've been making the other ones inactive this page here, I guess, is one I didn't get to yet, but we're not just so it's it causes less confusion but but the information on the left, should be
Is what I set up. But the thing that you might want to pay attention to is the match it time
That's something that you can change when you run the job I do highly recommend using banner pin them.
As, as long as most of your patrons have a pin them because that's the least likely identifier to change. I don't normally recommend using barcodes because that changes very frequently, so
If you're pretty confident that all your users have pitons that's really what you should be using as the match point
If there's troubleshooting. If there's issues with the load and you might need to want one time loaded matching on a different number. You can do that and then reload it, but I do highly recommend using pin.
Yeah.
So once once you run the job.
Then you need to look at the report and there's two ways there's two places you can look you can look in the integration profile itself, which is the the window on the top where you could use the regular monitor jobs page which that sometimes gets a little crowded.
And and it only it's only easy, you'd have to search for the student information system job because there's all the other jobs that run in all of that are listed in there. And if it's older than 30 days.
You can't even you won't be able to search by that. So I always prefer to use the integration profile of job history, as you see on the top window so that's that's what I would normally recommend to to look at the results of the job.
So this is an example of, of what job history looks like.
So the the top line there it says total records processed. Don't be alarmed by that. I know a lot of people thought that that's the user records, but just to explain that that's
It's not user records. It's number of files when Obama loads an XML file, it breaks it up into 100
Records per file. So it creates 65 separate files. So that's kind of what it's what it's referring to there. But so the other the numbers you really want to look at the
The number of created users and number of updated users and rejected users and you want to kind of pay attention to what you would have expected.
So, you know, normally the beginning of the semester you would expect to see a larger around a large number of created users in the middle of semester. And so much so you do want to kind of keep an eye on that.
Yeah.
And so the file after the fourth just
What's really cool about Alma is when it, when it runs
When it after it runs the job it renamed the XML file with it gives it a dot old extension so that it doesn't get
Confused, so that the next time you run the job. It won't rerun the file again. So your old XML files are renamed with the old extension. So when you run the job. It will only look for the new XML files that you put there that haven't been run yet.
I'm still working on a script that will clean up a lot of those old files, but I'm waiting to make sure we're not going to need any of them.
And
Yeah. So anyway, so yeah, that's it.
Um, yeah, this is kind of what I was saying before that.
You know, depending on how often you run the job. It's that's the number of users. You should see created or updated.
If you see a large number of created users in the middle of the semester. It could be an issue. It could be duplicate users. So you want to make sure you want to keep an eye on that too.
And even faculty depending on, I don't know. You know, I think, again, this is, this will depend on each campus, how, how, what, what time of year your students register, how often throughout the semester they can register when they're dropped out period is
To really, it really depends on when you look at the the rejected users. I think China's got some other slides on that, but just just, you know, if it's a high number. You really need to look at the rejected users.
will shine will go into that next.
All right. Excellent, thanks go yeah and and you know I think that the thing that I that I want to just point out on from this slide is is to question
You know, are these rejected users important enough to you where you want to take
A little bit of time to develop a process to load them into Alma because one of the things, and why we're presenting on this is
I looked across all of the institutions and I saw dozens and dozens and probably at this point. Hundreds of si es files being loaded, and I never saw any of them load without a fair amount of rejected users. And then I never saw anyone go back right after it and load another file to
To load any you know to load any of the rejected users. And I don't think we're ever going to get to a point where you're going to get 100% of the users.
To load. And if it's faculty and you're only loading them five or six times a year or two times a year, then it's probably very much worth it for you to do a little bit of data manipulation to
Get those users into Alma so that there's no primo there's no link resolve or problems, you know, and it is worth your time to go in and reload them.
And I don't think it's too terribly hard to go in and reload and to fix the data and we'll go over some of the common errors, etc.
And I just want to prompt. Are there any questions so far, I haven't seen any in chat. But you all have the ability to unmute yourself if you want to ask something that you don't want to do in chat or if you want to type in the chat. We'll, we'll take a look there too.
Okay.
Alright, so some of the rejection reasons that we're seeing. And I'm going to go through the ones that are that are most common and explain a little bit about why they're coming up. And then, in essence, what you can do about them.
So the first one, and I had to blank out what those identifiers were because it's an identifier for somebody. It's personally identifiable information. So you would see an identifier and then it would say have a type of something
Is already taken across the institution. So what that means is that
You tried to load an XML file that had an identifier.
Of that type, but it exists in a different identifier or even potentially in the same identifier and there wasn't a match.
So what you would need to do is to look at that identifier and you can usually copy and paste the identifier into just a general user query and Alma
And then go and see compare against the XML file and see what the disparity is and then either delete identifiers or fix them and then potentially reload the file.
So pretty much, it just means that there is some sort of a mismatch of identifiers somewhere where they're in different identifier locations that that number is showing up in. There's a variety of reasons for that.
The majority of them are manual data entry coming out about
A coming up of Allah, Alice, and some of them are coming from Alma
So, yeah. So Andrew in the list. And this is just a screenshot of a report, and some of them there are hundreds and hundreds of them.
Each one is a different user or a different identifier. So you'd have to go in and look at each identifier and say, what should I do about that user. But once you get a strategy, it's going to be, it's going to be pretty quick. And you should be able to assign it to somebody
You know, it doesn't need to be a systems librarian who does the cleanup work necessarily
And the other piece that we're finding quite a bit is that there is some difference in primary identifiers, mostly because of the migration, the different identifiers are have been moved around quite a bit between Alice and Alma. And as much as we tried to
Clean up all of that data. We're seeing that there's a lot of
Primary identifier mismatch. And even though it's listed as a primary identifier, you can change.
The primary identifier and Alma. So if what needed to happen is that
You change somebody's primary identifier. You could do that.
And then just reload the file and and fix that data.
So in in the case here, I have the primary identifier is already taken by another user in this feed and when Gail was referring to duplication across different files. If you see in this feed that means that of the files that Alma loaded out of that zip that zip folder.
That there's duplication. If he across the institution. That means that there's a problem between the data and the XML and Alma
So if you saw the primary identifier is already taken across the institution, you've got to go look at the primary ID and Alma if it's in the feed, then you'd need to go look at the XML file that you just loaded to see where that duplication is in some cases.
It's just kind of how the banner selection happens you know what we've seen this a lot, is that
You know, a faculty who is now a dean is listed as staff and faculty and their primary identifier is exactly the same and
It failed the load. So what you need to do is you need to reload that because you didn't load either one of them because there's duplication in the feed and almost not quite smart enough to say
Prefer the faculty over the staff or prefer you know what we've also seen as faculty or staff who are graduate students, almost not smart enough to say prefer the faculty over the graduate student in that feed. Does that make sense.
Generally, so whenever you see feed its duplication in the files and you need to make sure that you're reducing or you're preventing that duplication and then reloading the user whenever you see it in Alma, you just need to deal with the alma data.
Alright any questions before I move forward.
Alright, so this is one that I think we're just going to continue to see over and over again, which is missing or invalid data you're taking data out of banner.
Which is a complex system which, at some point has people entering data into fields, in many cases, or most cases. So it's not always perfect. The one I've seen most often is the address line one is missing, especially
With
With a home address that's not in the United States and that will fail the entire user record from loading it what it won't load the rest of the user record and then just load a blank address it fails, the entire user from being loaded
Again, get Gail was indicating that the email is we've found that it's sometimes missing because of banner data issues or sometimes because of mapping issues from the Sikh is application or how campuses are configuring that's when it comes up quite, quite a bit.
And then what we what we've seen quite a bit. Is that phone types address types and
Email types that there's a lot of invalid ones coming up.
And we've worked with campuses to reduce that most of the IT departments have done a great job of configuring that mapping better. However,
Banner. It always has new things coming in and new types. So it might be something where it's a infrequently used to say phone or address type
And it hasn't been mapped because it's not used very often. So even, even if you think that, you know, even if we've worked with you and you think you've, you have this all settled the these types are probably going to come up. Occasionally, that they're invalid. So that's a good thing.
That's a good thing that that you can go back to your IT person who's or if you're doing it and you can look at that user in banner and say, Okay, I need to configure this differently.
So Amanda asked a good question. So that the story on which is the which is the secret application that pulls the data out of banner and extracts it in all my complaint XML.
That should, should that be pulling phone numbers. So that depends on how you have it configured many campuses that we see. I would say the vast majority are pulling phone numbers and the vast majority are pulling multiple types of phone numbers.
But I know a few have chosen not to pull phone numbers. And so you can configure it either way. But if the data is there in for phone numbers it and you want to configure it should sorry on will pull it out.
Does that answer your question or did you have a really good one.
Alright.
So,
These are the major reasons why things are why think why why user records are being rejected and I have looked at hundreds of of
Reports and I've never seen one that had less than 10 that it failed, you know, even if it's a smaller one. Many of them have
You know, hundreds, a couple hundred if you're if you're loading 10,000 then you know it's not out of the ordinary to have a couple hundred that would fail.
So I'm going to show you how to do some cleanup, or at least to start looking at the XML files a little bit more strategically.
But it's you often need to rerun the file after you've done some cleanup either in Alma or sometimes, you would need to clean it up and the XML file. The easy way to do it. If you needed to do clean up in Alma
And you didn't save a local copy of the XML file is that you would just go into an FTP client and look at that most recent most recently run mostly recently ran
A file and then you would just rename it
From the old to zip. So you would just wipe out everything after the dot zip and then you would be able to completely rerun that
That XML file or that zip file and
And and potentially get, you know, 10 or 15 2030 more users to load into your system.
And so, Galen I've talked a fair amount about this and I my strategy usually is not to rerun the entire XML file, especially if I'm doing a fair amount of
data manipulation, because I don't want to work on a file with 10,000 and I do something and mess it up on 10,000 and then have to go and then reload that and, you know, create a problem with 10,000 records.
But maybe i'm i'm pretty cautious in that regard. So you can just create a new XML file pretty easily. And I'll show you how to look at the user
The user records in the XML file and pretty much all you would need to do is copy and paste those users that you would have in the XML file and
Put, put the nesting tags to say that it's XML and then an uppercase users to open the the the file and then an uppercase or uppercase closing users to close the file and then you should be able to create your own custom XML file and zip it and rerun it.
Any questions on that.
So again, this sounds really complex, but once you look at it, it's not terrible to do and mostly because the XML coming out of the seek is sore your application is pretty you know it only produces the tags that you need. So you're not dealing with huge user
You know, user tag elements, it's, it's pretty it's pretty straightforward.
So the best way that you can prevent a really bad load of data and believe me I've loaded a few where I said, Oh my gosh, I just loaded
10,000 bad records. And then I had to go manipulate the file and reload 10,200 undo the issues is just to do a little bit of review and I use notepad plus plus, you probably have your own
You know editor that that you'd like to use. But nope nope notepad plus plus is free and it's you know it's pretty well established. So I find it. It's pretty good for doing this.
And then what I typically do before I load files is I check the important data points that are coming out of the story on application.
And it's really not that many. Even though.
You know, it may seem complex. It's pretty straightforward. So this is just a screenshot of doing this in notepad plus plus, and I'll do a quick demo of it and just a bit.
Pretty much what I'm doing is a basic search strategy using the the find in notepad plus plus. And then I searched for parts of tags. If it's something where I want to see if there's variations in a tag.
Or an entire tag. If I want to see if that tag exists, and especially if you're looking to see if there is missing data elements.
Using the
The, the Find all in an open door find All in Current documents does a really good job because it gives you a count of how many times
And in the XML and I pasted in the header of the XML file that you'll get from the story on application. It gives you a count of the users in that XML file. So if you were looking for missing email addresses and you did a search for
You know, email preferred or some sort of email tag marker and you saw that there was only 5000 you'd want to say, well, it looks like there's a lot of missing email addresses is this, you know, let me go see what's going on.
And the, the thing I would say is that I usually do them for I usually do all the searches. I'm going to go over
But these are mostly campuses that we're getting the first or second time that they've loaded it so I want to be a bit cautious because
The IT department is making changes on the story on application, but you might not have to do all of these all the time. You'd have to just look for the problems that you're
Seeing repeated.
But these are the specific searches and I'll we will share the we will share the the the documentation here so you can just replicate this
These are the searches that we do to look at your, your XML. So the first one that we look at is the email preferred tag to see if you have enough email preferred
If there's no if there's no email preferred true for user than none of the notices or any of the jobs that send, send things out of primo that that won't work for that user. The other one is x expiry date.
And you just want to make sure that you have enough expiry dates and that they're right.
Because that's a configuration piece and story on which some people have forgotten. So what you don't want to do is load.
All of your users with an expiry date that is tomorrow or that is two days ago because that will mean that no one will be able to circulate or login to Alma because it will say that their account is expired or login to primo either
And then a good way to look for these invalid types is just to do multiple types of multiple searches for those types. So address underscore type
Email underscore type phone underscore type and then look for both accounts and what's coming up.
And then you'll also want to look at user groups, especially if you've not loaded these many times and indicate, you know, it'll show you what user groups are in that file and then just make sure that they're valid as far as Alma
And this is just there. There are three email types that are acceptable and three phone types that are acceptable and then for address types that are acceptable. So if you see any, anything that looks different than the email, phone or address
types that are here that's likely going to
Create a lot of rejected users and in
Alma and
Most of the time these are pretty good after you get the you know the the mapping issues worked out. But I've still seen new ones come up, even with the campuses, who we've worked with them.
Quite a bit. So it's good to look for one of these three or one of these four as you're doing searches for those types.
And then you'd want to look for the user groups make sure they're all valid, especially if this is the first time you're doing it and you want to be very careful to
Not create new user groups without really thinking it through because
All of your fulfillment configuration is mapped to user groups likely. So what you don't want to do is create a new user group to match your XML without doing all of the configuration work that you would need to do to make that user group actually work.
The one thing on the user groups that we will point out is you could see some disparities in the description. So the description in the mapping table. That doesn't matter. It will still load has no bearing on on really anything
Other than maybe if you're searching for the description in analytics.
What really matters is the code so that 30 has to match as faculty on both the XML and and and all
And then most of you should have done this already, but you would likely want to look at all of your identifiers and make sure that those match and that you're connecting the mapping table and Alma to what is listed in your identifiers in the XML.
So you can easily find what identifiers. You have activated.
In in in Alma just go to admin and then look under user identifier types and you'd see that code table.
So I'm just going to show you quickly get out of this PowerPoint and show you quickly.
I'm Shannon, I just want to jump in here and say with with XML. We have found that upper and lower case it does matter. So, like, in particular, like with the email types and address types.
The code has to be lowercase if the code for email type, for example, school if you have an uppercase letter in there, it won't. It's considered invalid. So we want to make sure that your case is correct in the XML right
And I've found that it will load it and you will you will think, oh yeah, everything went well because XML looks good. If you're not looking for case and then it will just load blank data.
In those in those fields often that's happened to me a few times on on on a few tags. So yeah, definitely. Um, so, uh, anything else on that, Gail. Sorry.
Yeah, alright.
So I just want to show you. I mean, this is notepad plus plus. Everybody see that see my screen on notepad plus plus.
And I just recreated a file from one of the big seek is produced file and the seek is produced files are going to be pretty pretty standard and that they're going to be
You're going to have this as the header with the number or the count of your users. And then you're closing users tag every single user has to have in an opening and closing user tag. And if you miss just one even out of 10,000 it will fail the entire file.
But you know you'll figure that out. After you look at it a few times. So it's pretty easy to look through these just to look through a file or to look through a user really quickly.
This is one I created fake for myself. You see the expiry date. The primary ID always comes first and then you have addresses and you could have multiple addresses this one just has one
And then you could have multiple emails. This one just has one and then you'll get into the identifier section and then it will end with the RS library section so
Most of these should be kind of worked out for you. But I'll just show you quickly how I do the searching for the the different issues we're seeing so
Just do a Control F and you'll get this where
You can look for find all and current documents and you'll see email type
And you can quickly see what email types you have and if you see one that said employee or
You know, Puerto Rico is one we've seen quite a bit.
PR and then a bunch of spaces Puerto Rico, you know that that's not valid. So you've got to go back and fix the configuration. And if you want to load it. You've got to fix that one, you know, piece and then you could also do things like
You know, email preferred and
Look for
Differences in the data.
So in this case I have four so I know I have four users in that XML file. And if I do a search. I see that
Three of them you know that there are three that are true. And then there's one that's false. So
What I'd want to do is I'd want to look at that and say, you know, is this something that I need to fix. You know, do I need to go in and just
change that to true.
And fix it there. And that's how I've done a lot of them, and then you can if you see lots of problems, you can always replace it.
With email preferred equals faults with email preferred equals true. So you can do some good data cleanup as well just using notepad plus plus.
So that's pretty much how we do the vast majority of review of the files and then we would also look at your identifiers. And then what we're doing is we're looking at your data and Alma
And looking at your identifiers and making sure that they're you know that it's a match that it looks accurate. Any questions on how to do that.
And if you have a user that failed and let's say you see in the report that it says
Primary ID Shannon is already taken across whatever and you needed to
Do some manipulation in the XML file, you could just search on that larger file and then you would just copy and paste this user for this user, you know, tag, tag base and paste it into a new XML file and do your data manipulation there and then just reload it
I'm gonna go back to the slides here.
All right.
Oops.
I should have done from the slide. I was on
So once you've actually loaded your data and you want to go do some some review because we've seen, we've seen issues come up
One of the things I recommend that that you do is to take five or six representative users. So, you know, if you're loading faculty, staff, graduate students and undergraduates, maybe look at one from each and then go in and search for them in just a user search in Alma and
Take a look at their the data that was updated via Alma or via the si es load. So,
The things that I would look most for would be blank expiration dates or expiration dates that are not not forward, the amount of time that you want them to be.
blank emails are missing emails or emails that are not marked as prefer and really you just have to look in three different tabs so general information.
And this is where you would see expiration date, you'd see the first name, last name, you'd see their user group.
And then contact information, you would see if they were missing addresses and I, you know, in this case, Maggie's
Came in without any address, but it does have an email address and it is marked as preferred
And then I didn't put identifiers here because we'd have to show some of these identifiers. But you'd be able to see what their what their current identifiers were to to see if there was any issues there.
And this is a known issue that we've been told by actually this is going to be fixed in the December release. But some of you.
May be, and we don't have a list of who this works for and who it doesn't work for
You could see in the history tab, what the si es load change. So in this case,
I loaded a file and Empire states Alma, and all of these things were, were update updated for for Tim's record it said, you know, this is a new
These are preferred. This is the new email type and you could see this for any user that you would look at. So if the history tab works for your campus, that's another really good place to see what what has been updated.
So if you don't want instant gratification and you're okay waiting until a date after it has run, then you can do an analytics report. And that's pretty easy to see what has been updated and just generally what your user database looks like.
So you can easily create a report yourself Gail did a everyone a favor and created a shared analytics report that you can use to check your user data.
So you would just go into the shared folders go into the community and then find your way into the Sunni main folder and and look at that, look at your data there. So,
This is just kind of a screenshot of where you would come from Analytics open that and then navigate yourself down to Sunni and then users and then load it there.
Um,
I just wanted to review a few known issues and problems.
That are caused by those known issues that we're seeing coming out of. Sorry, I'm pretty pretty regularly.
That we're still seeing that the email preferred is often coming out as faults and that you need to really work on the configuration there. What happens with that is that no email is sent to the user.
If they don't have any preferred email address, then no no mailing address is marked as preferred. And this is something that you would have to do data manipulation on the XML file to actually fix and because so many campuses are loading multiple addresses.
Just let us know if this is something that you want help with
And we can show you a strategy, but it's not something that I think most people would want to just kind of tackle on their on their own without some assistance.
But what will happen if you don't have any mailing address marked as preferred is that when you print out any notices that you might want to mail to users. So if you print out last book notices and you mail it to them to really scare them with paper.
There won't be any address so you won't be able to do you know you won't be able to put them into
mailers that have like a you know a window on them, it'll be more manual. So you'd probably want to fix that.
So a lot of campuses have started or not a lot. Some campuses have started to automate loading and and and running their files and some of the questions that we're recommending that they ask
When you start to automate and. And first we want to say you should really look at them. When you automate them. Don't just set it and forget it, because you will get
More and more users who just build up that they're missing from your system and what will happen is that people will complain and the real source is that you need to adjust some configuration or you need to do some work to load that five or 10% who's not getting loaded automatically
So some of the things you know having looked at many campuses who've automated their loading. One of the things that I would recommend that they look at is
Are the issues that come up as far as rejected users are they the same ones, or are they different. So is this something where the percentage, the number of missing users is going to increase or is it just that you have 10 users who refuse to give any phone phone
And and that's missing from that that data. So is it something that you know it's the same people over and over again, or is it an aggregate where you need to spend some time.
On a monthly or quarterly basis to bring more of those users in by doing some some data cleanup and then loading a custom XML file.
So is it something where there's a pattern or is it pointing to a mapping issue. Are you seeing things like invalid or or missing.
You know, missing address line one where you could potentially change the configuration story or ask for
Maybe some banner changes or, you know, look at things a bit differently. And then can you easily find those patterns and can you reload that file or can you make the changes.
without spending days and days, and for the most part. Yes, you could. There's only somewhere. I've seen. And I'm like, that would be way too much work to get 15 users.
And in some cases, the source data is missing that that that information. So banner might not have it. In other cases, it's a story on mapping issue or just a general mapping issue.
So Sunni will help you over the course of the next six months to look at that. To give you suggestions with how to deal with that data or that cleanup.
Just let us know, especially if you're automating and the thing that I would recommend and I have not seen any campus that has done this and that's why I'm highly recommending
You don't just set it to automate and schedule it and then never look at the never even look at the jobs is that you should go into
The monitor jobs and you should be emailed someone should be emailed both on success and failure because the job could be a complete success, right from the almost standpoint, but it could load inaccurate data. We saw this happen with a campus where
A slight change happened on their config and banner and they had been loading blank email addresses for a couple of weeks, and they needed to quickly make this make this change and they didn't see it, for I think three weeks.
Because they weren't really looking at the at the data.
And this is pretty easy to do, you just go into the monitor jobs and then go into that specific job and then add your email address and do it on both success and error.
And a piece of just a piece of information duplication of users and this could happen if people working at the desk are creating new users and they don't put in the right identifiers are they don't put in any identifiers that are going to be matched in an Alma, and this is load.
That that's a little hard to actually fix, so you cannot currently merge users and Alma
That was released in September, and then they pulled it back and said they don't currently have a time frame on the release of that feature. So what you'll have to do is go in and delete one of the users or to go in and
manually enter enough of the identifier information in the incorrectly entered
Duplicate user to make the si es sync start happening going forward. So just know that duplicate users are are kind of a pain point. So you want to try to reduce them as much as possible.
Alright any questions or do you want me to run through actually loading a file in Alma or have you seen how to do that.
I'm Amanda has a great question.
Where can you. Where can you configure Alma to reject users with missing fields.
We have gone back and forth with x Libra on this. And we've escalated it to say, how do we configure mandatory fields so that
A user is rejected, if it's missing x y amp D and we have not
We have not received any response where it's clear how you can do that.
Deal. Did I miss any anything on our mini communications with actually Bruce on that. No.
You. Correct. I believe that there are like four manually adding a user, you can require certain fields, but not for the system.
And we've gone through and done testing to see if something's listed in the essays documentation as mandatory would that fail. And that's not even the case so
That's what why we're saying it's it's it's really one of those things where even if your jobs are clean. You should still regularly. Look at your user data.
And that's why Gail created a fantastic analytics report where you can go in and look at that data and you can look for patterns pretty quickly, because things could be loading poorly and you wouldn't even know about it by looking at the job reports.
Yeah. I forgot to say my my mantra is just because there are no errors in the report, doesn't mean the file, though, did what you expected it to do and just be where
Do you want me to demo anything or, you know, we have just a few more minutes. Or does anybody have questions, or is there anything we didn't cover that you would like us to cover and subsequent S is loading.
And as I know a few of you on the line. We have done one on one sessions with you as well, which we can do, you know, over the course of the next six months.
Where we go through things with you because it's much easier for us to do that in a one on one setting because it's only a few of us so we can look at your data and you know it's it's less problematic in looking at things like analytics and reports.
If we go in and look at your, your data with you where we can't really do that in a larger setting with the personally identifiable. Identifiable information.
Yeah. So why don't I just demo how to get to that is that
I got logged out it's it's named users, I believe. So if you go into analytics design analytics.
And then go into open and then open again.
And just go into shared folders, you're gonna want to go into Alma community and then scroll down to this. Oh, one Sunni and then when you click users. It's the only one, the report of users. It's the only one in that in that folder.
And you'll see it load and I'm not going to let it load, because it will load a bunch of identifiers, which we don't want to show you. So
Let us know if you need to. If you need any help with with getting to that.
Yeah, Catherine, great question. Gail and I were talking about do we want to do we want to get into purging users and adding purge dates and we decided that was a bridge too far for this session.
But we plan on doing it in the very near future.
So, so yeah, so the si es has will not delete it only adds or updates users, there's an additional job for
Purging users, and for the most part, you need to go through a couple step process where you create a set and then add a purge date to them, which it's nice and that you have to be quite deliberate about what you're doing to purge users. It's actually a very, I think it's a very good process.
At least
You did multiple times to fix mistakes that I did.
Yeah.
Yeah, so we were thinking we wanted to do this because we were seeing enough issues coming up with users not being loaded. But, you know, probably in the next two months is that soon enough, three months maybe
That puts us into January 2020 I'm just putting like that's probably when people will pay attention again after
Thanksgiving, but
So we're at the three o'clock hour. I'm happy to stay to answer questions. But, you know, we want to respect your time.
All right. Yeah. So, so we were thinking that there's not a there's not a huge pressing concern for purging users and I think you're saying like yeah, you just want to do it sometime
All right. Um, any other questions, and what I will say is
A don't hesitate to reach out to us if you wanted, you know, individual session, an individual session or consultation, most of you are already working with us on this, but
You know, we're committed to having this be successful because it is so important, with everything else that goes on and all mine primo so we're happy to spend the time working with you because it makes the most sense to work CAMPUS BY CAMPUS on some of these some of these issues.
All right, I'm going to stop the recording.