The Challenge
Maine Maritime Academy (MMA) provides general reporting to the entire institution through a centralized location, their IT Department. This improves data integrity and reduces the man-hours required to obtain the necessary information used to make business decisions.
The Academy was going to be moving some applications from on premise to the cloud. Most notable of these was StarRez, their residential community management platform. With the on-premise version, IT had direct access to the database for both integrations and reporting. Moving to the cloud would eliminate that direct access, causing complications. IT would not have a good way to tie information from StarRez into their typical reporting process.
Lots of people on campus need access to the data from StarRez but don’t need to view or edit the data in the system itself. Yet, in migrating to the cloud version of StarRez and losing their direct access, IT thought they were going to have to give several end users access to the StarRez application. This looked to be a major inconvenience, as it meant spending a lot of time and other resources creating accounts for each end user and training them on the system.
The Solution
MMA was going on ten years as an Evisions client, using Argos in some capacity in almost every department on campus. Argos gave them a way to produce on-demand, up-to-date information for these departments through a centralized provider (IT).
During a conversation with the Evisions Client Engagement Team, Maine Maritime Academy mentioned they were going to be moving some applications to the cloud and that doing so would create some reporting challenges. It is then that a member of the Client Engagement Team told them about a recent addition to Argos that could address this issue: the REST Connector.
The REST Connector is part of the Argos Connect advanced feature. It’s an easy-to-use interface and setup that can directly connect to cloud data sources and return data in JSON or XML formats (which can then be reported in Argos).
Knowing the situation they were in, being able to use a new feature in a tool they were already utilizing was a no-brainer in MMA’s eyes. With some assistance from the Client Engagement Team and Evisions Support, MMA was able to get the Argos REST Connector implemented in just a few hours. With it up and running, and with their StarRez instance having just been moved to the cloud, the IT Department was able to resume their normal reporting process with very little downtime or interruption to end users.
As additional systems and services migrate to the cloud, Maine Maritime Academy is confident they will be able to use the Argos REST Connector to maintain their connections and reporting processes. This means IT can continue providing important data – whether on premise or in the cloud – to key decision makers throughout the institution.
“Since data is kept in various forms and in several different containers, we needed to collect all of that information to view individual residence data and to illustrate the state of student body residential life. Our Systems Integration Specialist was able to use Evisions Argos to offer a single interface to satisfy both objectives and complete the queries efficiently and completely.”
“I regularly use Argos to tie data together from several systems. I love that I am able to provide up-to-the-minute data from disparate systems to my end users. It saves a lot of time and resources.”
“We recently migrated StarRez, our housing system, to the cloud and thought we lost direct access to the database. Fortunately, Evisions introduced the Argos REST Connector to us just before our cloud migration. We have used the REST Connector to modify our dashboards and reports to access the data from the StarRez cloud database, making access to that data seamless for our end users.”