The Coursedog Method
Coursedog takes a tested and holistic approach to determine the best fit for your integration needs and quality assurance.

1. Technical Discovery Session - Our initial step is to gain a better understand of your technical landscape. We will discuss your current set-up, customizations, security, and integration preferences.
2. Data Workbook Session - It is important to understand how your institution stores and maintains the following scheduling and curriculum data (e.g. sections, courses, programs, etc). Coursedog’s integration process begins with reviewing your data against our schema, which details the fields that we normally GET (receive from the SIS) and POST (send back to the SIS). We also delve into the following topics during these sessions:
   • How many of each entity (sections, courses, departments, instructors, buildings, rooms, terms and subterms, crosslisted courses etc.) we should expect in Coursedog
   • Filtering that we should apply on the fly through the integration: i.e. ‘Exclude 45 specific departments by department code, exclude inactive rooms, exclude rooms of type ‘o’, exclude inactive instructors etc.
   • Customizations done to your system
   • Correctness of the SIS as the source of truth for the data we need
   • Correctness of the listed source tables and fields from your SIS.  Reviewing the listed SIS tables/source for each entity.  We need to know if our certified build will 'just work' or if there are adjustments needed given any custom work or areas of the SIS that you don't use in a vanilla way.
   • Identification of any additional fields that we should get from your SIS that are needed in Coursedog or needed by the SIS when creating or updating data.
     
     We can provide a list of current supported fields, tables and objects for your SIS.
3. Recommendation Session - After gathering information we will present our best fit analysis along with considerations and benefits.
4. Installation - Coursedog's Data Engineering team will work with your IT staff to install the connector into your staging environment. This process typically includes a data resource (DBA), developer, and network engineer. 
5. Data QA - Coursedog's Customer Services team will work directly with the functional and technical staff to ensure the data synced to Coursedog meets the needs outlined in the datawork book session. This includes ensuring key data is synced, filtered out (where necessary), and key value pairs are entered.
6. UAT & Training - Coursedog will train the functional teams how to use the application so they can begin user acceptance testing (UAT). During this period the technical teams will be in a support mode to help close any gaps. 
   Coursedog will also train the technical team how to effectively use our admin panel to monitor the application. 
7. Go-Live - Coursedog will work with the technical team to migrate the solution from the lower environment(s) (e.g. staging) to production. 

Implementation Resources