Ethos Integration - FAQ and Requirements

What is Ethos?

Ethos is a unified platform for standardizing data integration and related functionality in the Ellucian ecosystem.  It includes a shared data model, integration APIs, and additional components for workflow, analytics, and identity management.  

The two main capabilities that are of interest to us are the data model and the integration APIs.  

The data model provides a common language for interacting with all Ellucian products, and the APIs give us the means to access that data.

Mongoose does not offer a direct integration with Banner or Colleague, but offers an integration with Ellucian Ethos which allows you to import data from that system. Mongoose does not have a direct awareness of forms, databases, or concepts from the underlying systems - the shared language for integrating with all the Ellucian products is the Ethos Data Model and the APIs.

The image below illustrates this - the “Authoritative Application” would be Banner or Colleague and Cadence would be an “API Consumer.”

What Ellucian products does it include?

Banner and Colleague are both currently available. While the Ethos infrastructure exists, each Ellucian product is at a different place in their roadmap in terms of making data available to Ethos. Cadence does offer an Ellucian Recruit integration based on the Microsoft Dynamics API.

As Ellucian releases updates to the Ethos Data Model, each product must also support those APIs and data models - specific versions of a product can be supporting a different version of Ethos data model and APIs at any given time.

What functionality does the integration offer? What functions are planned?

From a Banner and Colleague perspective, the ability to import Person data from a Person Filter is available. This includes core fields (such as Name Type and Mobile Number) that stored on the Person record.

There are additional data elements that we will continue to add (application status, recruitment funnel details, advancement/giving info, etc) as they become available in the Ethos Data Model. As noted above, this happens on a different schedule for each product, for each data model.

We plan to add the ability to send conversation data and opt out data back to Banner and Colleague when those data models become available in Ethos as well.

Is there a cost to set up the integration? What are the requirements on campus?

From a Mongoose perspective, the main software components of the Ethos infrastructure that are utilized for our integration are available to schools at no cost.

From an Ellucian perspective, your school will need to be on a specific version, noted below, of your system of record for Ethos to be supported, and there may be specific database and API upgrades within that product that are required to support specific Ethos versions. These updates may have costs associated with them on the Ellucian side.

There are also additional software components that will need to be installed and configured to support the connection between the product and the Ethos infrastructure.

• Colleague WebAPI version 1.12 or higher (latest version available recommended)  
• Ellucian Messaging Adapter 2.4.1 or higher 
• EDX

• Banner Event Publisher 2.0.2 or 9.0.1.1  
• Ellucian Messaging Adapter 2.4.1 and Messaging Service 2.0  
• Banner Student/Integration API App 9.6 or higher. (latest version available recommended)  

Note: Please check with your Ellucian Customer Success Manager to verify requirements.

Who can I contact to talk about what requirements are needed on the Ethos side?

Ellucian professional services are available to help you work through this process and if there are any questions about requirements, costs of services, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager at Ellucian.