Integration with our own membership system

[Bill M]

Hello.

We are operate a maths tutoring product that is specifically tailored to individual student needs. 

We have our own internal membership system and pupils currently login to our application via their own usernames and passwords.

What is the recommended practice for enabling automated login to our system via Clever?  

1. Would we have to acquire and pre-load Clever Identifiers for each existing pupil and then match these Identifiers at SSO login time?

Or

2. Can Districts apply our existing usernames to student records in Clever which can then be acquired by us after SSO login?

Any help very much appreciated

Bill

[Taylor Singletary]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for the great questions!

If you're only using Clever for SSO and don't have access to rostering data, you'll essentially be provisioning incoming users on demand. If your existing student and teacher user records already contain email addresses or identifiers provided by school districts/SISes, then you have some of the best data points available to match incoming users to. When a student or teacher signs in to your application, you'll receive a few pieces of information you can use to attempt user matching:

• a unique Clever ID for ongoing matches
  
• a "sis_id" that corresponds to the ID of the user in the district's SIS
  
• For many users, an "email" field, also provided by the SIS.
  
• For many users, a credentials.district_username field which some SISes/districts provide for students and teachers.

You won't be able to match every user with these fields, but they do tend to result in the best matches. We touch on this a bit in this doc.

If you're also using Clever for roster sync, these matching strategies generally remain the same but instead of performing matches in real time as users sign in to your application, you would perform the matching during a regular syncing process. Some further recommendations for matching in roster syncs is here.

At this time, it isn't possible for a district to send app-specific usernames or other data via Clever.

One recent announcement we made is about a new tool we've just started piloting called Matchmaker that aids applications in matching district data to their preexisting records. 

Thanks again for your great questions.

Taylor Singletary

Clever Developer Relations

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[Bill M]

Hi Mark

Thanks for the info.

is it an acceptable use case that, if we don't know who the Clever user is yet, to put up our login screen so they can identify themselves to us?  

Then we can save their Clever ID and they will be put straight through from that point forward?

Bill

[Taylor Singletary]

It's definitely acceptable to help users find their already-existing accounts in your service and link them up to their Clever ID. We've seen some great implementations of this flow.

Thanks,

Taylor