Understanding External Search/Match

External Search/Match functionality looks and feels much like the standard Search/Match that resides in Campus Solutions (CS). However, External Search/Match integrates with any external system and enables your institution to perform searches within that external system and import records into Campus Community. The goal is to provide complete and meaningful lists of potential duplicate IDs in your entire environment, including IDs that reside outside of the CS database.

External Search/Match executes these searches with the help of two delivered web service operations. You can then use web services to import a matching constituent that does not exist inside the CS database. Web services send outbound search requests from the system of record to an external system and also receive inbound responses coming directly from the external system. As enterprise architectures grow more complex and CS may no longer be the sole source of person data entry and maintenance, searching against external systems ensures that no duplicates exist in your environment.

As with Search/Match, you can perform three types of searches with External Search/Match: applicant, person, and organization. However, the system performs applicant and organizational searches only using Search/Match at this time; you are able to search for only people when using External Search/Match as part of integration with an external system. External Search/Match allows you to search for people simultaneously against the CS database (using the current Search/Match), as well as directly inside an external system; the process displays the combined results inside CS search results pages. If your institution integrates External Search/Match with an external system that allows advanced searching capabilities (for example, External Search/Match is integrated with a data hub that has fuzzy matching capabilities), this extra search logic can be leveraged and the results returned to you contain a richer set of matching candidates.

External Search/Match reuses the same setup parameters and security configuration used for standard Search/Match functionality.