Client Conversation: ScholarRx

by Kaiden Gray

ScholarRx needed to deliver Single Sign-On (SSO) as demand from medical schools surged. Instead of sacrificing their product roadmap to build integrations, they chose Edlink as an integration partner.

Hear from Justin Klutka, CTO of ScholarRx, on how Edlink empowered them to integrate SSO in just two weeks — saving over 4,000 development hours and supporting 75,000+ educators and students over two years.

Discover how Edlink helped ScholarRx stay on track, streamline integrations, and deliver seamless experiences without slowing down product development.

Download a PDF version about ScholarRx's experience partnering with Edlink here.

Enjoy:

Justin: This is the kind of thing that simply didn't exist 10 years ago and I was really glad that I actually found Edlink and kind of proved the skeptics wrong. In the sense that there are people out here thinking about this problem – thinking about providers like us who you know day-to-day is not around SSO. Our day-to-day is around our products and our services. And so I was just really glad to find a solution out there that fit our need and our stage for our business.

0:35 | We had a conversation with our client, ScholarRx. This is how it went...

My name is Justin Klutka and I am the CTO of ScholarRx. I've been the CTO of ScholarRx for three years where we focus on medical education.

o:51 | Why did you need integrations?

I think along higher education – which that's the market that we work with exclusively higher education medical schools around the world – there's an expectation to utilize the SSO type of experience. Because as as any consumer could probably tell you, nobody really enjoys managing many many accounts when you know the many digital experiences that we use in our day-to-day life and students and faculty are no different. They really want to be able to use their single identity given to them by the university to log into our platform. So we saw the need in requests to meet the customers where they wanted to be. And that's what drove the selection of Edlink for an SSO solution.

1:49 | What led you to seek out an integration partner?

At first we contemplated several strategies including trying to build out our infrastructure to handle SSOs in a sort of customized way. But ultimately I made this decision that was not where we needed to put our greatest investment in that our our limited engineering and testing and product capabilities didn't need to focus on SSO. So that's when I began the process of seeking an integration partner, somebody who could provide us a fairly quick and simple and scalable way to provide the SSO solution. And that's how I first learned of Edlink.

2:35 | How did you hear about Edlink?

Well so I had done quite a bit of research across the industry. I've been in edtech for a very long time now. So you know I started by reaching out to various colleagues and searching for solutions out there what other folks had tried to to do in order to solve this. And I did come across the colleague who said "hey you should check these guys out they're they're doing something interesting in the SSO and LTI space." And so that's how I first learned of the name Edlink and then from there I did my own homework and got to know the team at Edlink and that's how we arrived at the decision.

3:17 | What value does Edlink provide ScholarRx?

I think it was in the middle of 2022 and we brought Edlink in primarily to solve for challenges we were having with SSO-related projects. So for example, it we were having several customers ask us for an SSO integration. And we were very focused on building our products and our solutions and we didn't really have time in our roadmap to pause and perform an SSO project. So we saw Edlink as a way to come in and help us deliver an SSO capability without having to distract our product roadmap.

4:00 | What's been your journey with the edtech industry and integrations?

Happy to share. I think you know when I started down the path of evaluating a solution here around SSO, just in general, I think there was a lot of skepticism in the industry – that there was going to be somebody out there that had already solved for this. And honestly my career in edtech, it goes back a couple decades.

This is the kind of thing that simply didn't exist 10 years ago and I was really glad that I actually found Edlink and kind of proved the skeptics wrong. In the sense that there are people out here thinking about this problem – thinking about providers like us who you know day-to-day is not around SSO. Our day-to-day is around our products and our services. And so I was just really glad to find a solution out there that fit our need and our stage for our business.

5:07 | How did ScholarRx evaluate Edlink?  

We are very much a hands-on, proof-of-concept-type shop. We did our due diligence. Thankfully, Edlink made that pretty easy, in the sense that our environment was provisioned. We were able to work with test LMS implementations and I think in pretty quick order we were able to prove out that it did indeed work in our environment. We had to make some minor changes into our login flow, but we were able to test those in lower environments. And once we saw that it could work and it could scale we felt pretty confident that we could go forward with customers that we had waiting for the SSO capability.

5:56 | How long did it take to implement Edlink?

It's hard to remember the exact timeline but I want to say we had it in production in under two weeks. You know if I had to estimate. And from there we already had a backlog of customers ready for integrations. We were ready to start taking those customers on pretty much on day one of the implementation being finished.

6:25 | What resources did your team need to implement Edlink?

Yeah we were able to pull together from our side the resources. It very it took a very limited number of resources to implement Edlink. In fact, I was intentional about trying to bring as few of my engineers into the process. So essentially our head of security and I would say um a small fraction of one of our engineering partners or team members to basically implement Edlink. It was very lightweight from our perspective we didn't have to bring a lot of resources to bear which was great.

7:07 | What integrations do you use through Edlink?

We see a lot of integrations into Microsoft Azure Ad provider, but as you would
expect in this in this industry we see our share of Canvas and Blackboard
integrations as well. Those have been the primary providers that we integrated with.

7:31 | How did Edlink "win you over"

The thing that "won me over" about using Edlink was just the simplicity of it all. I mean we went from essentially having to say, "no" or "not right now" for customers asking for SSO capabilities because we were just simply too busy to resolve the request – to something, that in some cases, I could jump on a call with a customer in the matter of one hour or less I've gotten the process started for SSO. And in some cases completely finished and established by the time we left that call. But even in the longer duration examples, it might just take a couple conversations with the university's security team. Answer some very simple questions and the process is moving forward. That's really what won me over. It just became something that could be put in place with minimal energy from my engineering team, and it was pretty simple for our customers. That was really important too, something that wasn't going to overwhelm or make our customers struggle. And they found Edlink pretty easily.

8:49 | What challenges have you faced by using Edlink?

I think, honestly, the biggest challenge – and looking back it was not a huge challenge – but it was just introducing customers who maybe were not familiar with Edlink. But the Edlink team they made themselves available. They were happy to jump on calls like right alongside us and help establish a relationship with the customers. But for the most part it was just finding the right way to articulate how the Edlink integration would work. And that took a couple times to to get right, but once we had it kind of scripted and understood, it became something that became very easy and kind of second nature to just introduce to our partners.

9:35 | Has your team had any big wins since using Edlink?

I think the biggest success story is in the two years we've been using Edlink we've been able to rapidly implement 10 SSO integrations. That is with minimal disruption to our product roadmap and all the other things we have going on behind the scenes from an engineering perspective. So that in of itself is a huge win. There have been specific customers who, I'll say made the SSO decision kind of late in our onboarding experience – and I think in under the prior model that would have been a cause for a lot of concern because there simply might not have been time to go implement an SSO under those conditions – but because we had Edlink, it was well established, we were able to be extremely responsive on getting that SSO set up. There might have been one or two of those sort of late-in-the-process decisions to go with an SSO, and thankfully, because we had Edlink, that really wasn't a stressful scenario. It was pretty easy to resolve and a win for us.

10:47 | What does the future of ScholarRx and integrations look like?

We need to embark farther on the LTI integration capability. It's a very common request from our customers. Because our platform it's very modular, it's very sharable, it's designed in such a way that an LTI implementation could be tricky for us – we were not designed from an LTI-first kind of perspective – but we know that it's an area that we want to explore. We're hoping to leverage the Edlink capabilities to get farther down that LTI experience.

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