Appliance Overview
The
Advisor appliance is a standard rack-mount server unit that resides on your campus network. It contains all the software and data necessary to manage your degree requirements and provide degree audits to end-users. Users connect to the appliance via a Web browser to access their accounts and utilize the tools the appliance provides. The following diagram illustrates how the appliance interacts with your campus:
Appliance Features
XML Import & Export
To facilitate data integration with your existing student information systems, the
Advisor appliance is capable of importing simply-formatted XML documents that describe your course offerings and your students' transcripts. Additionally, degree audits can be exported to a documented XML schema, allowing you to mine them for data or even to build your own views of the audits.
Low IT/IS Impact
is distributed as a managed appliance solution because we know that schools have enough problems keeping their existing systems functioning properly. This model avoids injecting new programs and scripts into your systems, which may already be overburdened and difficult to maintain. The
Advisor appliance handles all of the processing and storage associated with the maintenance of your degree requirements and the creation of degree audits. This also eliminates the finger-pointing that occurs when software from multiple vendors is installed on a single system, and something breaks. In addition, the ease of management of the
Advisor system means that IT/IS personnel will have little to do with it beyond finding a place to plug it in.
End-to-end Encryption
All communications with the
Advisor appliance external to your data center are necessarily encrypted, and all internal communication with your student information systems may optionally be encrypted as well. We even provide and maintain the SSL certificate that secures all Web-based interaction with the appliance.
Layered Security
While encryption ensures that no data or password is ever transmitted across a network in plain text, this is only one of the essential aspects of a truly secure solution. We also maintain strict firewall policies, run a bare minimum of services, validate user input, avoid programs with poor security records, and actively monitor the appliance for any sign of attacks or unusual activities. In addition, we apply security patches to the operating system and all software on the appliance — not just our own — as soon as they are released.
Full Hardware Support
We are entirely responsible for the proper functioning of the appliance, including all associated hardware. If the appliance ever experiences a hardware problem, we upload your latest data to a replacement appliance and ship it to you overnight at our expense. Since the replacement already contains your settings and data, all you have to do is plug it in and start using it. Then just return the old appliance in the same box, postage paid. No more relying on third-party hardware vendors for support!
High Availability
In addition to our security monitoring and worry-free hardware support plan, we also regularly monitor the appliance to ensure that its major services are functioning properly for users. If a web server crashes or a database query bogs down the processor, we will know within minutes and can intervene to return the system to normal operation, as well as to find and correct the cause.
. The higher-ed business publication's discussion of degree audit systems identified Advisor as one of "two niche products [that] appear to dominate this specialty."
