Plain English troubleshooting

Nothing is more frustrating than an error message that tells you nothing about the problem or how to fix it. 

Any integration toolkit should give you plain language explanations so administrators can easily read the issue, understand the problem, and correct it.

Errors should follow standard User Experience principles and be visible, using colours to help you understand the severity of the problem. They should also be recoverable, meaning that you can fix them.

Each datum that is imported into the LMS should have its own record, so you have visibility over which records were imported and which were rejected. These records should be searchable so you can find exactly what you need.

Intelligent deduplication

When your integrations are filtered into your LMS, they need to match the record from your external source to the LMS. If it’s matching against a person’s surname only, what happens when you have two people with a common surname? If it matches against a surname and birthday, what happens if you have twins? 

These are basic examples, but they highlight a very important case for making sure your data is specific enough to match only one user in your entire system.

This process of following an algorithm to eliminate all other possibilities and find just one record that matches your data is called deduplication. 

Intelligent deduplication should match

• Correctly
• Based on rules you set

And if it can’t match based on the above, a great integration will tell you why, just like we explored above.

Flexible permissions

Any system will only work based on instructions you give it. So it’s important that you can give your system detailed rules. 

For example, your integration tool finds a user in the data who is suspended in your LMS. What does it do? What if no user exists when trying to find a match for the record? Should it ignore the data, create a new user, or do something else?

These are basic examples, but they highlight the “What if?” scenarios that are important to consider when dealing with bulk amounts of data. 

In summary, your integration tool should take the thinking out of handling data.