SchoolMessenger

Erica Goldberg
Erica Goldberg
Second Anniversary
in Education Management APIs

Anyone ever set up a SKY API with SchoolMessenger? I just found out Blackbaud support doesn't do that for us and I'm totally lost. Please help if you can. Thanks!

Comments

  • Todd DeSchuiteneer
    Todd DeSchuiteneer Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    @Erica Goldberg support is correct, most integrations are self-managed at this time and a member of the school staff would have to enable them. Unfortunately, SchoolMessenger isn't an official Blackbaud Partner at this time so this integration would require you to have a subscription to the ON API in order to set up.

  • Michael Panagos
    Michael Panagos
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Erica Goldberg
    We do. Normally, for products where the company isn't an official BB partner I write an automated PowerShell script to create the data file(s) and then have it upload as the company needs. With PowerShell, I can set up proper logging, security, & email alerts in case of errors or warnings.

    In this case, our School Messenger setup is so old we are still using an old “WhippleHill.exe” program that pulls any SIS list using the legacy School API that WhippleHill created for us before they were bought by Blackbaud (I've also had to update the program once to work with the newer network security requirements). I will likely revamp the setup to a more modern PowerShell SKY API script in the future.

    Either way works fine (at least for as long as the legacy API is still available to use). For SchoolMessenger in particular, we pull the list data for the parents and they have tools that will tweak the parent information dump into a CSV that they can import. All the tools for adjusting the data and for uploading are provided by SchoolMessenger and they can assist you in that. You just need to pull the necessary information down for them using the SKY API (using any programming language or setup that can access it). If you have someone on staff that is willing to do a little programming or scripting, I'd be happy to provide a starting point for them.

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