Last year Alabama became the first MIS2000 state to introduce a fully automated way to set the migrant flag in their state student data system using MIS2000. It has been working smoothly in production for nearly a year now and we're starting to use this same approach in other states to allow MIS2000 to integrate more tightly with other state systems. For Alabama, we basically just hammered out a Snap Report that could be run at any time to produce a list of currently eligible migrant students that the state was interested in. Then we turned that into a web service. See my earlier blog post about how Maine is using Snap Reports as web services. From there we gave their IT folks a way to access the web service.

So currently they're pulling the list of students nightly via the web service and then running a process on their state-level system to clear all the old migrant flags and set them according to what is up-to-date from MIS2000. And it works very nicely. I know some states are doing this manually by running a report in MIS2000 and then handing it over to someone at the state as a CSV file, so here's an opportunity to make everything better and reduce your workload as well.

An extra nice outcome of this is that we usually charge extra to develop custom imports and exports for MIS2000. But since these web services are really just Snap Reports, we can use this approach at no extra cost, at least on the MIS2000 side. If you'd like to pursue something like this for your state, just let me know.