Integration Overview

Integrations empower the exchange of information between two or more systems.

Integration messages contain information or the payload, which is being transmitted between Student Financial Aid and at least one school system. Student Financial Aid uses XML for its integration payload. Any external system may integrate with Student Financial Aid, as long as a consistent language is maintained; this language is defined in the XML Schema Definition (XSD) file(s). Student Financial Aid leverages its own integration messages to communicate between the Student Portal and itself.

Messages are sent to and from Student Financial Aid through the Message Processing Gateway (MPG), which contains built-in error handling and message retry mechanisms to handle exception cases. Integration messages may be sent in real-time or aggregated and sent in a batch at pre-determined intervals.