Integrate Apple School Manager with your Student Information System (SIS)
Use Apple School Manager to securely integrate with your Student Information System (SIS). After you’ve authenticated and connected your SIS, specific information—such as management, staff, instructor, student names, and classes—is copied into Apple School Manager. You can then assign roles to your staff, instructors, and students and set their initial passwords. Apple School Manager periodically updates changes from your SIS. At no time is data written back to your SIS.
When you connect your district’s SIS to Apple School Manager, it provides a unique ID for everyone in your organization (including school management, staff, instructors, and students). Apple School Manager also tracks changes to classes and instructors throughout the year. So, for example, if a student joins two weeks into the year, a Managed Apple ID tied to the student’s instructor is ready and waiting.
If you’re connecting to a Student Information System (SIS) or importing users with Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), and using federated authentication, users must have an email address. See Create Managed Apple IDs.
Before you connect to your SIS, you may want to decide how to create your Managed Apple IDs. See Intro to federated authentication.
After you link Apple School Manager to your SIS, you’ll see the name of the SIS and what was imported—for example, the number and type of users, the number of classes, and locations. You can also adjust the view individual window to display additional users.
SIS updates
Apple School Manager receives updates every 24 hours from your SIS, so when a new student is added to the SIS, Apple School Manager automatically creates an account and a Managed Apple ID for that student. You can then share that student’s account credentials with each student.
Note: During the summer break, many SISs won’t return any data, because they’re scoped to fetch only current information. This is expected behavior from your SIS. If you want current data in Apple School Manager, manually sync the data before you make any changes.
Connect to a Student Information System (SIS)
In Apple School Manager
, sign in with an account that has the role of Administrator, Site Manager, or People Manager.Click Settings at the bottom of the sidebar, click Data Source
below Organization Settings, then click Connect next to SIS/SFTP.Click
next to Find Students, Instructors, and Classes, then select Connect to SIS.Choose your SIS type from the pop-up menu, then click Continue.
Because each SIS handles its data and security differently, follow the detailed instructions shown in the window for the SIS you selected.
Enter any required information, click Connect, then wait for the copy process to complete.
Depending on the connection speed and the amount of data being copied, this process could take some time.
Review any errors that occur. You’ll need to correct these in your SIS system.
To review errors in detail, see Read a log file.
Click “Review [name of SIS] data” to view the data being added.
Make sure the data looks correct, then click Confirm.
Important: Don’t edit information on an account after connecting Apple School Manager to your SIS. Doing so results in the account being considered a local account and it is no longer associated with your SIS.