At the beginning of the 2018/2019 admissions cycle, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) began using UniCAS™ — Liaison’s university-wide Centralized Application Service (CAS)™ — and WebAdMIT™ — Liaison’s robust admissions management solution — to help process and manage the 5,000-plus applications its graduate programs receive each year.
While the first year using Liaison’s tools proved to be a “very positive experience,” according to Associate Director of IT for the Office of Admissions Robert “Scott” Bauer, the school was very focused on integrating WebAdMIT with its existing cloud-based and on-premise SIS and ECM systems in a secure and reliable way, and they felt that they needed a little extra support to do so.
“That’s where Constituo came in,” Bauer says. “It allows us to take the information gathered by WebAdMIT and UniCAS and push it into Banner, our student information system, and Perceptive Image Now, which we use to create PDFs.”
In a recent webinar, Bauer offered insightful details about how he was able to achieve those goals.
For example, he explains that VCU chose Constituo because:
- The cloud-based tool requires less technical support at the university level.
- It offers “very flexible” configuration based on each program’s specific needs.
- It provides an exceptional user experience for data remediation and updates.
- Admissions professionals can see on a daily basis what information has been pushed from one system to another and can compare data between systems.
“Constituo doesn’t just push information into Banner and Perceptive Image Now,” Bauer explains. “Constituo also pushes information back up to UniCAS and WebAdMIT. That’s very useful for program directors because now they have access to all of the information on our SIS without having to look it up.”
Constituo also allowed VCU to:
- Enhance the functionality of UniCAS for managing applicant references.
- Configure applicant PDF imports to referenced programs.
- Configure integration from Banner to UniCAS.
- Decrypt and import SSNs into Banner.
Bauer says the experience has been so successful that VCU intends to replicate its UniCAS integration process for all of the other Liaison CASs in place at VCU.
“VCU has had a very positive experience with Constituo every step of the way, from the planning stages through the testing phases,” he says. “Everyone on the Constituo staff exceeded our expectations and we’ve been very happy.”
Do you have 15 minutes to spare, knowing that it could change the way you do business at your institution? Watch the webinar below: