Once you've built your Edlink integration, it's time to go live. Edlink provides an out-of-the-box school onboarding flow to facilitate this process. Our onboarding flow is pretty cool (if we may say so ourselves) and typically takes 5 to 10 minutes for a school to complete. During this process, the school IT administrator will set up the necessary technical connections between their data provider and Edlink. Edlink will then validate the connection details to confirm that the configuration looks good and that we have the required permissions to access data.
Once the configuration is complete, Edlink will begin syncing school data (if necessary) and the integration will appear on the Edlink dashboard in the requested state where it can be activated by your team when ready.
Initiating Onboarding
There are three primary ways to get schools connected to your application:
1. Generic Onboarding Links
Generic onboarding links are the simplest way to invite IT administrators to connect to your application. You can find your generic link on the Onboardings tab of the dashboard. It is unique for each of your applications and it will not change so you can safely include it in your product or documentation if needed.
2. Unique Onboarding Links
Unique onboarding links are similar to generic onboarding links but they are unique to a specific school. You can generate a unique onboarding link for a school by clicking the Invite a School button on the Onboardings tab of the dashboard. This link can be shared with the school IT administrator to initiate the onboarding process.
The primary benefits to using unique onboarding links are:
- It can be easier to manage the onboarding process for many schools as you can track the status of each school's onboarding from the dashboard.
- You can ensure that the link will only be used once (by the intended school) and it can optionally expire after a certain period of time.
- It can help with making sure the correct IT administrator is connecting the school's data to your application.
3. Custom Onboarding Links
Custom onboarding links are similar to the unique onboarding links described above, but they are generated via the Edlink API. This can be useful if you want to programmatically generate onboarding links for schools or if you want to integrate the onboarding flow into your own product. In addition, there are a few more options you have when generating links programmatically (e.g. automatically selecting a data provider, automatically approving the integration). You can find more information about generating custom onboarding links in the API documentation.
Notes about Onboarding
- It is not necessary to have completed your Edlink API integration prior to onboarding. This can be particularly useful if you're running up against a tight deadline (e.g. back to school) and you want your implementation team to be able to focus on getting schools set up while your engineering team completes the API integration.
- Edlink typically maintains only one connection to an LMS or SIS per district. Given our scale, it is likely that you will encounter districts who have already connected their LMS or SIS to one of our other clients. In these cases, the onboarding process will be expedited as the district will only need to approve the connection and not set up the technical details.
- If you are working with multiple Edlink applications, the school will have to go through the onboarding flow for each application. However, the process will be quicker as the school only needs to input the technical details once.