About Chris Malek

PeopleSoft SCIM Integration

Chris Malek was engaged by James Madison University to integrate their OKTA SSO tenant with PeopleSoft.

This project’s goal was opening up PeopleSoft so OKTA could send send SCIM messages to create and update users. OKTA is a cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) service. SCIM is a standard for automating the exchange of user identity information between identity domains. The project involved designing and implementing a SCIM 2.0 server in PeopleSoft to allow OKTA to create, update, and manage user accounts in PeopleSoft.

The project required extensive knowledge of PeopleSoft integration, PeopleSoft Security, OKTA administration, and the SCIM 2.0 protocol. It also involved working closely with JMU’s technical teams to ensure that the integration was successful and adhered to legacy requirements. designed and implemented all the technical aspects of this PeopleSoft side of the prjoect. This included:

• Designing and implementing the SCIM 2.0 server in PeopleSoft. This included using best practices for PeopleSoft integration.

• Working with JMU’s technical teams to ensure that the integration was successful.

• Testing the integration to ensure that it met JMU’s requirements.

PeopleSoft High School Dual Enrollment from Slate

Chris Malek was engaged by UMASS and Solidan to design and implement an integration of Slate and PeopleSoft for the High School Dual Enrollment program. The goal of the project was to allow students to apply to the program through Slate and have the data flow into PeopleSoft to automate the admission of the students.

A key accomplishment was the development of a custom PeopleSoft Integration to pull data from Slate and create student records in PeopleSoft. This process could be run on a schedule or ad-hoc, providing flexibility for the client.

The integration included functionality to search for existing student records, update them if found, and create new records if not. This feature streamlined the integration process and reduced the need for manual intervention.

To facilitate data review and error handling, a staging table was created in PeopleSoft. This allowed for the inspection and modification of data before it was integrated into the student records.

Overall, the UMASS Dartmouth Dual Enrollment project was a success. The integration of Slate and PeopleSoft streamlined the data transfer process, reduced manual intervention, and improved the efficiency of the program.

PeopleSoft Mainstay Integration

Chris Malek was engaged by National University to integrate PeopleSoft Campus Solutions with their Mainstay tenant. This project involved integrating the Mainstay SMS Campaign system with the PeopleSoft Student Information System. The goal was to automate the flow of data from PeopleSoft to Mainstay to streamline the creation of targeted SMS campaigns for students.

Chris Malek designed a configurable solution that automated the data syncs between systems. Chris technically led the integration project and implemented a large portion of the code.

I accomplished this integration by developing a PeopleSoft bolt-on solution that acts as an HTTP client to interact with the Mainstay REST API. This solution:

• Uses a custom cache table to store student data and the last sync date for efficient data management. Monitors for changes in student data using audit tables and a configurable daemon process, triggering a sync to Mainstay when changes are detected.
• Maps complex PeopleSoft data to simple custom fields in Mainstay for easy segmentation of student audiences.
• This automation has reduced manual effort, allowing for more targeted and timely SMS campaigns. The solution is designed to be easily maintainable and adaptable to future changes in both PeopleSoft and Mainstay.
• The solution enabled the university to be more proactive in engaging students and improving student success metrics since the system no longer relied on file uploads.

PeopleSoft and IDM Integration

Chris Malek was engaged by UMASS and Solidan redesign and implement a new authentication and provisioning system for PeopleSoft Campus Solutions. Their legacy system was showing age and causing system instability and support costs.

In this project, I spearheaded the drastic simplification the authentication that was causing system instability. A new bolt-on integration with their IDP provided a streamlined solution for managing user provisioning in PeopleSoft Campus Solutions. I had to collaborate with cross-functional teams to assess, design, and implement the new system.

Our primary objective was to replace outdated authentication methods with a more secure and efficient SAML-based approach.

I also designed and implemented an event-driven system to provision and reconcile user accounts in real-time, improving data accuracy and system responsiveness from their IDP.

Additionally, we developed a comprehensive suite of APIs to facilitate seamless integration between PeopleSoft Campus Solutions and the IDM system.

To ensure the successful implementation of this new system, I meticulously documented the technical design, outlining the intricacies of the authentication and provisioning processes. This project significantly improved the efficiency and reliability of PeopleSoft Campus Solutions, and it serves as a testament to my ability to lead complex technical projects and deliver innovative maintainable solutions.

California Virtual Campus

California Virtual Campus is an initiative by the State of California Community Colleges to help students complete their education at any community college in the state. The goal of this project was to facilitate matriculating students at one Community College to enroll in an online class at a different Community College in the state without having to go through the application process at the second school. This involves creating student data, matriculating, enrolling and recording payment information. This enables students to find online class offerings across the state and enroll in those courses to complete their degrees with minimal friction. Without this process, the students would be required to go through a lengthy application and admission process.

This is a complex project involving the integration of every community college SIS system in the state which varies greatly between each school in software and implementation practices. The implementation is ongoing and involves many solutions providers including Quottly and N2N Services.

The colleges implement the CVC integration in two major phases:

• Course catalog and schedule synchronization to a central website.
• Cross enrollment which involves creating and enrolling students in schools in real-time from the “CVC exchange”.

Chris Malek designed and implemented all the PeopleSoft web services that are deployed to Community Colleges that use the PeopleSoft Campus Solutions SIS system. These web services allow vendor systems to extract key catalog and schedule information out of PeopleSoft in real-time. For the cross-enrollment functionality, the web services will fully admit a student to the university. This includes demographic, academic, and financial data. The web services use our standard best practices to ensure there are minimal upgrade and patching implications for the clients.

The PeopleSoft code is currently deployed at the following schools for at least one phase and eventually will be deployed to every community college in the state that uses PeopleSoft.

• Los Rios Community College District
• Los Angeles Community College District
• MiraCosta College
• Glendale Community College
• Long Beach City College
• Palomar College
• Cerritos College
• Peralta Community College District
• San Diego Community College District
• San Joaquin Delta College

Coursedog PeopleSoft Integration

Coursedog provides Higher Education clients with innovative SAAS products for Course Catalog, Scheduling and Academic Planning. Their product must integrate data back into each school’s SIS system. Chris Malek worked with the Coursedog team and the N2N Services Illuminate Platform to design and implement the PeopleSoft integration layer. This PeopleSoft code is delivered to client production systems to enable the integration. Chris Malek designed a solution that was highly configurable and allows the same PeopleSoft project to be deployed to every customer but allows each customer to control what can be updated or retrieved with configuration. The web services use our standard best practices ensuring there are minimal upgrade and patching implications for the clients.

The PeopleSoft code designed and created by Chris Malek is currently running at the following schools:

• The City University of New York
• Stanford University
• University of California at Santa Cruz
• Illinois Central College
• College of Lake County
• Duke
• Florida State College at Jacksonville
• The University of Arizona
• UC Santa Cruz
• University of Minnesota

Coursedog continues to market and sell its products to other schools so more will be added to the list.

Financial Aid Forms Framework

Cedar Hills Group, Inc. was contracted to analyze, recommend and implement a streamlined solution to a paper-based Financial Aid (FA) business process for National University. The FA department was using a combination of paper-based forms and an outdated electronic system. Prior to this project, the legacy system was only collecting data for a very small percentage of the forms that could be required for a student to receive financial aid.

Chris Malek led the project, working closely with directors, subject-matter experts, and front-line advisors. After several prototypes, iterations and design meetings, a solution was designed and implemented to drastically increase productivity and remove paper from the process.

• We created a “Financial Aid Forms Framework” within PeopleSoft that allows new forms to be created by a subject-matter expert with no help from technical staff. The functional experts can add, update, and remove forms with only a web browser.
• We replaced a cumbersome and unreliable third-party system that was only a 10% solution to the business process and reduced licensing costs to the university significantly. The implemented solution was folded into the PeopleSoft database and ended up being a 95% solution to the paper-based process with no additional licensing costs and minimal upgrade concerns.
• The PeopleSoft bolt-on was designed to work exactly within the department’s current business process and policies, thus allowing for faster adoption of the project.
• The student-facing pages allowed for a simple “dashboard” by aid year when students could quickly see their form submission history and quickly find the status of any needed forms for the open aid years.

This project was arguably one of the most successful projects Chris Malek has ever worked on when looking at the ROI for the client.

• The project was implemented over several phases. The first two phases of the project implemented 90% of the functionality and was rolled out in a matter of months after the initial design phase.
• Those phases provided a drastic increase in turnaround time for the Financial Aid Department. In the previous process, the paper forms could take weeks to get back. In the new electronic system, an Aid Counselor could request forms from a student and then receive the electronically submitted forms from an applicant in minutes. This process improvement resulted in significant cost savings and productivity gains as well as happier students.
• Additionally, no developer coding was required to create new forms. The form creation and maintenance was all handed off to the department owners. After the project went live, the department started to see over 20,000 forms submitted in an aid year and configured over 60 forms per aid year all without the help of the IT department and very few bug reports.

PeopleSoft Brightspace Integration

Chris Malek was engaged by National University to integrate PeopleSoft Campus Solutions with their D2L Brightspace LMS.

Chris Malek designed a configurable solution that automated the data syncs between systems. Chris technically led the integration project and implemented a large portion of the code. He had to:

• Quickly learn about the Brightspace application concepts.
• Quickly learn about different API offerings by D2L which are called Valence and are REST web services.
• Create a design that merges the requirements from National University’s unique usage of PeopleSoft, Future State of Brightspace and business requirements. Additionally, we needed to account for future unknown functionality.
• Implement an oAuth client security scheme which PeopleSoft does not support out of the box.
• Implement a REST API client written in PeopleCode to interact with the Brightspace Valence APIs.
• Fully document the design for future team members.

The project was successful and continues to pay dividends in the flexibility of the design as different Colleges in the National University System transition to Brightspace.

PeopleSoft Salesforce Integration

Lingk provides clients with a cloud-hosted ETL tool based on Spark technology. Lingk and Cedar Hills Group, Inc. partnered to provide integration services between PeopleSoft Campus Solutions and Salesforce for a Wisconsin Technical College. Cedar Hills Group, Inc. deployed configurable web services that allowed the Lingk integration platform to extract large amounts of data out of PeopleSoft and map it to the College’s Salesforce instance used for student success and support. The web services use our standard best practices ensuring there are minimal upgrade and patching implications for the clients. The project also required that PeopleSoft inbound student applications from Salesforce could be admitted as active students which required integration with search-match, matriculation, term-activate and other Campus Solution modules.

Chris Malek role in the project was:

• Provided subject-matter expertise in PeopleSoft integration patterns.
• Provided subject-matter expertise in PeopleSoft Campus Solutions business processes and data design.
• Design and implement a “generic” web service that can handle extracting any PeopleSoft data via a web service.
• Design and implement a technical interface to matriculate applicants starting in the College’s Salesforce application.

PeopleSoft OKTA Integration

Cedar Hills Group, Inc. was engaged by National University to integrate their OKTA SSO tenant with PeopleSoft. The overall goals of the project were:

• Automatically provision student SSO accounts in OKTA as students are matriculated into PeopleSoft Campus Solutions.
• Automatically de-provision student SSO accounts in OKTA as students leave the university.
• Automatically sync PeopleSoft Campus PII information into OKTA as it changes in PeopleSoft.
• Provide a configurable mechanism to populate OKTA attributes and group memberships with PeopleSoft Campus and HR data.

Chris Malek designed a configurable system which:

• Interacted with the OKTA REST APIs to provision, de-provision and other account maintenance tasks.
• Allowed for configurable PeopleSoft Queries to drive OKTA group memberships.
• Allowed for real-time syncing of PeopleSoft changes to flow to OKTA.

The implemented solution is a key backbone of the University’s SSO process and handles large amounts of production data.

Augusoft PeopleSoft Campus Solutions Web Services

Cedar Hills Group, Inc. was engaged to create an extensive PeopleSoft Campus Solutions integration with the Augusoft Lumens LMS. (Augusoft is now owned by Modern Campus). This PeopleSoft code is deployed to Augusoft clients who desire a real-time integration between Lumens and PeopleSoft. Chris Malek designed and implemented a solution that allows for real-time updates to and from PeopleSoft. The solution includes the delivery of over twenty-three different web services including:

• Gets and updates on the course catalog
• Gets and updates on classes
• Gets and updates on personal data
• Gets and updates on learner academic data
• Gets and updates on registrations
• Gets and updates on financial data

This solution is currently deployed to the following schools:

• Virginia Community College District
• Frederick Community College
• St. Petersburg College
• Sheridan College

The web services use our standard best practices to ensure there are minimal upgrade and patching implications for the clients. Two of the clients performed a CS 9.0 to CS 9.2 upgrade and there were zero changes required to the deployed code. The code continues to be marketed and sold to new clients.

Modern Campus Destiny One Integration

Cedar Hills Group, Inc. was engaged to create a bidirectional PeopleSoft Campus Solutions integration with the Modern Campus Destiny One product. This PeopleSoft code is deployed to Modern Campus clients who desire a real-time integration between Destiny One and PeopleSoft.

Chris Malek worked with internal Modern Campus product teams to design a solution that was highly configurable and allowed the same PeopleSoft project to be deployed to every customer but allowed each customer to control what could be updated or retrieved with configuration. The web services use our standard best practices ensuring there are minimal upgrade and patching implications for the clients.

The solution includes the delivery of many web services including:

• A generic data GET service that can handle pulling data from any PeopleSoft table including but not limited to:
  • Course Catalog
  • Classes
  • Person data
  • Learner academic data
  • Registrations
  • Financial data
• Update and Create Services on:
  • Person
  • Matriculation
  • Term Activation
  • Enrollment

This solution is currently marketed to Modern Campus clients and several clients are in the implementation phase.

• Hypermedia using [Datastar](https://data-star.dev)
• Machine Learning and AI