Are there any K-12 districts out there that are currently using Skyward for their HR/Payroll/Finance solution? If so, have any of you done any integrations with it and Laserfiche?
We use Skyward and are starting to look at integrations with Laserfiche. I'd be interested in any info you might have to share.
Currently we have found that Skyward does not have an API, but does allow for direct access to it's database via ODBC connections. We are looking into the database to see how to make the queries we need. The main problem for us is that it is a Progress database, so Forms cannot tie directly into it, although Workflow could.
For right now we are running a data mining report and uploading it to an MSSQL database and using that to do all of our lookups with. We would like to get to the direct connection option because our data mining report is manually done, so when performing actions against HR information it is not live data.
UPDATE: I spent about 2 days on the phone with a Skyward Support rep. about using Crystal Reports with the Skyward database. Since you can export the SQL query Crystal Reports creates we can copy that query into Workflow. We are now tying most queries that are being performed by Workflow directly into the Skyward database. Also, we are now having Workflow perform the query of employee information and dumping it into a custom MSSQL database so it can be used by Forms. It is working great so far!
Hi Blake. Your post is from 5 years ago, so I wanted to see if you had any updates on this. Did you ever find a direct connection to Skyward to use with Forms? Also what version of Skyward are you on? Thanks!
Chris, I am no longer with the school district, but I do know that we switched it to use a Linked SQL Server so it does live lookups now. That seems to work well once you figure out the correct query syntax.
Got it. I am just jumping into the school district universe. Thanks for paving some of the way :)
@████████, in your travels did you ever successfully push data to Skyward? Or was it read only from Skyward. Thanks
@████████, yes. We were very careful with what we wrote back to the Skyward database since Skyward has a strict policy of if you break the database it's not covered by support. I do recall one item we wrote back to the database was a users email address.
thanks so much. Did you use an API for Skyward? Just curious about the connection type.
No, just ODBC.
awesome news. thanks!
Hi Blake, well it's a year later, do you know if Skyward YET has an API or are you still achieving your integration with ODBC and your Linked SQL Server? Thanks
Older version of Skyward:
You can use ODBC + SSIS to pull and convert the data. Skyward used a database called Progress which has similar syntax to SQL92. So you will likely need to clean it up on import. There were too many lags in doing a direct pull from the ODBC connection. It will time out and be useless, therefore the use of SSIS.
Newer version of Skyward:
The Skyward upgrade to QMlative should have more of an API type method of reading and writing data back to Skyward. We don't have it yet and there have been many setbacks on the Skyward side of things. Maybe someone else can speak to how QMlative is working?