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 institution (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 Intro to federated authentication with Apple School Manager.
Before you connect to your SIS, you may want to decide how to create your Managed Apple IDs. See Create Managed Apple IDs in Apple School Manager.
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)
If this is your first sign-in to Apple School Manager
, Setup Assistant appears. If Setup Assistant doesn’t appear, click your name in the upper-right corner, then choose Setup Assistant.Click Add
next to Find Students, Staff, and Classes and select Student Information System (SIS).Choose your SIS from the pop-up menu, then click Connect.
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 in Apple School Manager.
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’s no longer associated with your SIS.
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.
Note: 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.