Alum Directory: improve the RE/NXT API for employment and education
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Elizabeth Babb ’82
Alum Directory: improve the RE/NXT API so that changes to employment and education records made by alums in Almabase do not create duplicate records in NXT when synced.
The issue is that we pre-populated data into our alum directory from RE/NXT which has 40 years of data for us. After recently launching Almabase to our alums, they enthusiastically updated their profile data with titles for the employer record as well as updated majors and minors etc for their educational records. However, when this data is synced back to NXT, a duplicate record is created in NXT.
For example, if NXT already showed someone went to Stanford and the alum came into Almabase and updated that information to show they majored in Biology, when you sync that data from data inbox, NXT will show two Stanford records...one showing the major as biology. The wanted behavior is to append to the NXT record, not add it.
We have been through this extensively with support and yes, our transformations and sync rules are correct. We are told this a limitation to the Sync API for both education and employment records.
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Ginu
Hiya Elizabeth Babb ’82, thanks for this post! I have a few more questions for you:
- Can you provide specific examples of the duplicate records that are being created in NXT?
- How frequently are you experiencing this issue of duplicate records?
- What is the impact of these duplicate records on your day-to-day operations?
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Elizabeth Babb ’82
Ginu -
- Yes this has been extremely well documented with screenshots etc in Accord with my success manager, Shikha. It has been researched on your side and it apparently due to a limitation in the NXT/Almabase API.
- Everytime. We cannot sync any ADDITIONS to an educaton record (like Major or Minor for example) or ADDITIONS to an employment record like Title for example, without a duplicate being created. So we don't sync those two fields from Data Inbox if the data is an upate.
- It means that those in our office using NXT (our system of record) to research an alum, do not have complete data. It's not critical, it's just a pretty big miss on the API's part. Let's say you are researching an alum before contacting them and it shows in NXT that they went to Harvard. It would be nice to know what they majored in, so you sound like you know who you are talking with. Or lets say NXT shows they work at NVIDIA but they updated their title in Almabase and it was not synced. Then the person looking at that alum in NXT doesnt' know their title. Would be nice to know. Only two out of the 6 of us in Advancement use Almaabse. The rest use NXT. That's wjy we need to be syncing. NXT is our system of record with 40 years of data in it.