Start of Year Rollover: Refresher notes for MUSAC (Classic) schools – Ultranet Support

The following articles outlines some pointers to work through during the rollover process if your school has enabled SMS-LMS Interoperability synchronisation with MUSAC Classic.

1. Check your Interoperability settings

It is worthwhile spending a few minutes checking through the Interoperability settings in Ultranet, available on Admin > Gateway Services under the "SMS-LMS Interoperability Gateway" tab.

In particular, check that the username formats (Section 2.a.) and email settings (Section 3.b.) are still accurate.

2. Confirm handling of disenrolled or dropped accounts

If students are disenrolled in the SMS (e.g. student leavers), when the Interoperability sync occurs, their user accounts in Ultranet—and any associated parent accounts—will be disabled or deleted automatically.

Whether they are disabled or deleted depends on setting 2.c. on Admin > Gateway Services, under the "SMS-LMS Interoperability Gateway" tab. Check this before you run the first batch of the year.

We recommend that you temporarily configure this setting to "Delete" student accounts. This means your cohort of leavers will be automatically deleted in bulk from Ultranet.

Warning: Account deletion is not a reversible process, so please ensure that the student leavers have definitely been specified correctly in the SMS before synchronising with Ultranet.

Once the leavers have been removed, then the settings should be set back to "Disable student accounts" so that no students are accidentally deleted during the course of the year.

Note: Account association between the SMS and LMS is achieved by the SMS ID field. As long as the Ultranet user's SMS ID matches a user account in the SMS, then the Interoperability sync will identify and process them.

3. Clearing our manually-created accounts (optional)

Should you have any obsolete user accounts that were not created via Interoperability, they will need to be deleted manually. You can either achieve this one at a time on Admin > User Admin, or for larger number, use the Import/Export function (refer to this article for assistance).

4. Clearing out SMS groups (optional)

In some cases to avoid duplicates, all SMS created groups from last year need to be deleted in Ultranet. The first full Interoperability batch of the year will create all the new groups anyway, so it's best to delete the old ones before the new ones arrive.

Once these groups are created, teachers will need to assign the new groups access to their classroom pages.

Note: This step is more often useful for primary schools. Secondary schools may prefer to let Interoperability control the sync entirely, and clear out any empty groups using Group Admin after the sync has completed.

5. MUSAC Classic Interoperability documentation

The MUSAC documentation for managing Interoperability can be found here. The relevant section commences on Page 28.

We recommend spending a few minutes looking through the configuration screens, and make sure you are happy with the settings previously made.

6. Always use a full sync for major changes

To optimise on peformance and data transfer, the SMS will sometimes only transfer partial Interoperability batches through to us. On some occasions, this will result in major rollover changes being skipped in the sync process.

To manually override this, ensure that a 'FULL upload is FORCED' for the first upload of the year.

To check this go to the Configuration > LMS Settings tab in MUSAC. Be sure to save this setting (using the button at the bottom of the screen) before exiting this window.

Next, in the LMS Upload area, check that all students are ticked in the sync list. Make sure you save this. Click Upload, and the batch should start running.

Tip: Should you have any problems at all running this first batch, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us via a support ticket.