Ellucian Ethos

Penn is in the process of implementation of Banner FinAid and Banner Student modules. Ethos Integration is used in non-prod environments so far for integrations. Ethos Identity is used in production to provide SSO authentication via SAML-CAS bridge.

Ethos Integration is a work in progress. Some API's are still not available under this framework. However, it has the advantage of being an abstraction layer on top of the database, supports the publish-subscribe model. Since some Banner 9 modules still do not support the direct SAML2 connection, Ethos Identity (EIS Server) is a necessity for SSO.

Ellucian Ethos is used by other software vendors to connect to our central system and get the data that they need. In the past, what we had issue with is the fact that with every software solution we purchased we had to build custom integration tools to be able to communicate with our ERP system. Ellucian Ethos bridges this gap. It allows us to connect two systems that don't know anything about each other, yet they are able to communicate.

We live in the world where one system cannot solve all of your business problems, because of that we want to make sure that information is exactly the same across multiple systems and Ethos allows this to happen. Your identity and everything related to you will be exactly the same in all systems across the board. With cloud solutions coming up at the speed of light, it is imperative that every solution you acquire has accurate data in order to be efficient and cost-effective.

We are currently implementing the Ethos Framework, which is a significant feature upgrade to the Ellucian Colleague environment we run onsite. While not fully implemented yet, we are seeing how the Framework will add value to our customers by providing an easier integration model and data analysis features than we currently have. The number of point-of-origin data sets has grown over the past few years, and we have struggled to keep up with integrating these disparate sources. The demand for a single consistent point of reporting has grown in addition to being far behind in our analysis needs. Ethos Framework looks to fill these roles admirably. We have been able to integrate it with Microsoft Power BI for some basic test reports as well.

Existing or new Ellucian customers would greatly benefit from including the Ethos Framework into the software environment. The minor costs involved in time and analysis will provide a lot of dividends. Those who are not Ellucian customers would find better environments with other major vendors, as all the development would need to be handled in house.