[isams] Triggering Automatic Emails

[JamieJ]

Hi all, looking to see whether anyone has found a solution (or even developed one in house) for the automatic generation and sending of emails from iSAMS based on a workflow / data based trigger.

I've looked at the list of CRM systems that integrate with it, and unless I've overlooked it, they all are based on incoming leads (i.e. applications) and the integration pushes data into iSAMS at the point of enrolment.

What I'm after is something that works with the data in iSAMS and then generates emails without manual intervention (and wishful thinking would be to log it against the communication history of a student too!)

The sort of thing I'm looking to automate would include:

 

• Periodic confirmation of parental contact data held in iSAMS - people can quite frequently change mobile phone or email addresses, especially given that students can potentially be at the school for 18 years if they stay all the way through.
  
• Welcome emails to new parents containing information about the IT systems the school uses and how to create or activate their accounts - these are fine to send manually at the start of year, but its easy to forget to send them to students who join partway through the year.
  
• Exam reminder emails
  

We currently self-host and use SQL Standard, so don't have the luxury of Data-Driven Subscriptions in SSRS to achieve this; its hard to justify the difference in cost to upgrade to SLT when its free to just have someone click a button or two once a week. I'm also aware that potentially this could be done on the SQL server itself through scheduled tasks, but its not very user friendly and ideally I'd like something that can be administered by more than just myself.

[Danp]

Interesting to see what comes from this, it's something I have looked at. Point one specifically.

 

One option that might be possible is finding a way to tap in via the API in iSAMS in the same way Wonde pulls data.

 

The welcome emails could be done via creating an email template that only needs a few things changing such as email address etc before sending. That would only take a few clicks to send that as and when

[TechMonkey]

No help with your actual question but could you edit the template of the Parent Portal email to include your IT welcome information and then get the admissions person to send the email once a child is confirmed? They have been talking about their new Parent Portal having the ability for parents to update their contact details for a while now so that may solve point 1.

 

It would be great to have workflows within iSAMS but I don't think that is even on their roadmap. Having just looked at a fundraising CRM that had all of this natively and cost about half of iSAMS, I'm starting to feel education is going back to the bad old days of software development.

[dhicks]

Hi all, looking to see whether anyone has found a solution (or even developed one in house) for the automatic generation and sending of emails from iSAMS based on a workflow / data based trigger.

 

We use the web hosted version of iSAMS, and I've found their API pretty good to work with - it's simple enough to pull pupil and parent data from iSAMS via a basic GET request, and you can have a script look at that data and trigger any actions you want from there. We have a couple of scripts that send out emails triggered by data in iSAMS, I think the ones that actually send emails were sending via GMail (using the GAM command-line tool). I also have a script that syncs data between iSAMS and an email list in Mailchimp (so using their mailing list API), and I've separatly used Mailchimp's transactional emails API to send individual emails. iSAMS itself uses SendGrid to deliver emails, we found it easier in the end to use a separate product (Mailchimp) rather than try and manage a second SendGrid account with the same origin domain.

 

I don't know if the self-hosted version of iSAMS has a different API, I'm not familier with the self-hosted option.

 

Periodic confirmation of parental contact data held in iSAMS - people can quite frequently change mobile phone or email addresses, especially given that students can potentially be at the school for 18 years if they stay all the way through.

 

To confirm personal data, you're probably best sending out a blanket email to all parents pointing them at a link where they can check and update their data, rather than including any personal data in an email. For failed emails sent via iSAMS you should be able to to see those via SendGrid's dashboard - you might have to get iSAMS to give you access to the SendGrid account associated with your iSAMS setup.

[RLR]

We use the web hosted version of iSAMS, and I've found their API pretty good to work with - it's simple enough to pull pupil and parent data from iSAMS via a basic GET request, and you can have a script look at that data and trigger any actions you want from there. We have a couple of scripts that send out emails triggered by data in iSAMS, I think the ones that actually send emails were sending via GMail (using the GAM command-line tool). I also have a script that syncs data between iSAMS and an email list in Mailchimp (so using their mailing list API), and I've separatly used Mailchimp's transactional emails API to send individual emails. iSAMS itself uses SendGrid to deliver emails, we found it easier in the end to use a separate product (Mailchimp) rather than try and manage a second SendGrid account with the same origin domain.

 

I don't know if the self-hosted version of iSAMS has a different API, I'm not familier with the self-hosted option.

 

 

 

To confirm personal data, you're probably best sending out a blanket email to all parents pointing them at a link where they can check and update their data, rather than including any personal data in an email. For failed emails sent via iSAMS you should be able to to see those via SendGrid's dashboard - you might have to get iSAMS to give you access to the SendGrid account associated with your iSAMS setup.

 

Are you using powershell for your scripting or something else?

We are soon moving to iSAMS and I have quite a few powershell scripts at the moment pull data from SIMS via CSV files (commandreporter) but from what I understand, getting data out of iSAMS will need to be done via their API or SSRS.

[JamieJ]

One option that might be possible is finding a way to tap in via the API in iSAMS in the same way Wonde pulls data.

We use the web hosted version of iSAMS, and I've found their API pretty good to work with - it's simple enough to pull pupil and parent data from iSAMS via a basic GET request, and you can have a script look at that data and trigger any actions you want from there. We have a couple of scripts that send out emails triggered by data in iSAMS, I think the ones that actually send emails were sending via GMail (using the GAM command-line tool).

Funnily enough I did start looking at the APIs to see whether there was anything I could cobble together quickly from it. The batch API looks like it will let me pull data out en-masse but in a somewhat clunky fashion, and the REST API looks like it's potentially additional cost!

As I've got the luxury of direct database access, I'm probably going to just grab data directly from the tables and either create something in PowerShell to do the grunt work, or possibly a go down the route of creating a web-app of some description so I / other teams have more visibility and control over what has been / is sent.

 

No help with your actual question but could you edit the template of the Parent Portal email to include your IT welcome information and then get the admissions person to send the email once a child is confirmed? They have been talking about their new Parent Portal having the ability for parents to update their contact details for a while now so that may solve point 1.

 

Interestingly, the school took the decision to move away from the parent portal in favour of using My School Portal. Inevitably we gained some additional functionality but also lost a fair bit too. We've got all the email templates set up, but as with any process, remembering to do something is always the weakest link!

 

It would be great to have workflows within iSAMS but I don't think that is even on their roadmap. Having just looked at a fundraising CRM that had all of this natively and cost about half of iSAMS, I'm starting to feel education is going back to the bad old days of software development.

Having previously worked at a college where we extensively used data based triggers in the MIS system to initiate workflows or generate SMS or Emails, I can't help but desperately miss not having similar functionality in iSAMS. I guess I've just been spoilt!

[dhicks]

We are soon moving to iSAMS and I have quite a few powershell scripts at the moment pull data from SIMS via CSV files (commandreporter) but from what I understand, getting data out of iSAMS will need to be done via their API or SSRS.

 

I'm mostly using Python, with a few bits of Windows (well, DOS, really!) batch file thrown in.

 

If you have existing scripts expecting CSV files in a particular format it should be a reasonably simple (if possibly slightly tedious) job to get XML data from iSAMS' API and have something re-write that into CSV - that's what my scripts are doing, then we wind up with a bunch of CSV files we can use for various purposes.

 

If it's any help, I have a repository of scripts available:

 

https://github.com/dhicks6345789/data-tools

 

Probably not very useful in most cases, but "getData.py" does at least give an example of how to get data from the iSAMS API.

[dhicks]

The batch API looks like it will let me pull data out en-masse but in a somewhat clunky fashion

 

Indeed - you get a wodge of XML, which I find more useful to re-write as CSV containing just the bits we need. Something which tripped me up: the batch API caches results, and has a configurable (in the settings for each API key) cache retention time, minimum one hour. So it's not worth having a script run more than once an hour as data will only refresh hourly. That might be different for the local version, of course.

 

As I've got the luxury of direct database access, I'm probably going to just grab data directly from the tables

 

I'd tend to stick with using their API, just in case you shift to the hosted version in the future and want to keep using your scripts.

[SimonHooker]

Interestingly, the school took the decision to move away from the parent portal in favour of using My School Portal. Inevitably we gained some additional functionality but also lost a fair bit too. We've got all the email templates set up, but as with any process, remembering to do something is always the weakest link!

 

Within My School Portal you can schedule the emails ahead of time. If you're looking for an email to be sent on a recurring schedule, I'd suggest raising it through your account manager/support as it sounds like a decent improvement

[xlandhenry]

If your school uses O365, definitely have a look at Power Automate!

 

You can schedule it to pull data from virtually any API/database, and manipulate it in tons of ways or do other stuff using the data(send emails, update calendars or run applications etc.)