SSO SAVVAS Pearson digital resources via OneRoster

Austin Ewachiw

In a follow up to my post about using LTI and OneRoster to integrate BB with McGraw Hill online resources, (https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/569/50799) I wanted to share my success with working with publisher SAVVAS/Pearson on their integration with BB.


SAVVAS Easybridge (https://savvaseasybridge.com/) is the name of the tools and support team you need to work with to get your subscriptions and access set up to complete this.  Their project team was talented and super easy to work with.  We currently have the following texts that were eligible for this integration, which included 21 different class sections.  

• Biology
• Algebra II
• AP French
• AP Spanish

Unlike the McGraw Hill integration, SAVVAS uses a purpose built authentication link that creates an SSO into their products, and uses your OneRoster exports from BB to determine role and roster information for that Teacher/Student,


In our case, we use MS Azure AD as our Auth Provider, but this can be accomplished with the other Auth Providers like Google.  (As an added bonus, because we use BBID and Azure this link is already authenticated so it does not require any additional user information.)


Here is what the link looks like: 

https://sso.rumba.pk12ls.com/sso/login?service=https://cat.easybridge.pk12ls.com/ca/dashboard.htm&idpmetadata=https://login.microsoftonline.com/0d2a3785-c0e1-4c88-bdce-49ee19067f51/federationmetadata/2007-06/federationmetadata.xml?appid=8f9bb646-042c-4301-ac9b-5b9d27e6ae5d


On the SAVVAS side, you sFTP your OneRoster.zip file to them and can either schedule or just run when rosters change.


When a teacher clicks on the link, it shows the resources available to set up their sections and assign the book to each section.  Rosters are already loaded so once this is done, no other setup is required.  When a student clicks on a link, they only see the course assigned to them and are off and running.


Very simple, very elegant.  If you have questions or are interested in doing this at your school let me know and I can share more.


Austin ‍ 

Megan Day

Thanks for this info too, Austin Ewachiw‍!


We have only been using LTI integrations but don't have any experience with One Roster. So it sounds like any time there is a schedule change there is a need to export the zip file and then import to publisher. You mentioned "scheduling" that process. How did you accomplish that? Especially in the first few weeks of school, we have tons of schedule changes so trying to gauge how much time that process would take.

Austin Ewachiw

It's a great question! Where some solutions use an API connection to stay up to date, the SAVVAS solution uses an sFTP type of solution. For some this can be automated, but I never made that much of an effort. For us, I just ran a fresh OneRoster export whenever needed (takes a few seconds) and dumped it into Filezilla ftp client to upload (I'm old school like that...). They run updates nightly, so that 2 minute process give you a fully updated roster the next day.


The magic to me is that by assigning resources to class sections, not teachers or students, any roster changes are zero effort to the Teacher or the Student.