Hello all!

I work at The Barstow School in Kansas City and I have been put in charge of integrating RE and EE.  As I am going over everything, I ran into a question I am hoping someone can answer.  In EE each individual has his/her own record.  In RE, we have one record for married couples with one of them being the record holder and the other being spouse.  So I am thinking that when integration happens either the spouse will be lost (if we only integrate the record holder in RE) or duplicate records will be created for the spouse.  When integrating is there anything I can do to make sure information is not lost and/or additional records are not created?

Also, if anyone has any suggestions on things to do to avoid pitfalls when integrating, I would love to know.  My phone number is 816-277-0422.

 Thanks!

We are currently going through integration as well.  We are in the actual linking process.  We had the same issue in that our spouses were not constituents in the database.  You will have an option in the setup to either add these as new constituents or to link to the relationship record.  The integration is nice in that you can link to nonconstituent records.  You will not loose any data.  However, this does make it very important to use the non-constituent merge utility and make sure that you merge any duplicate relationships. (Example:  Mary Ann Smith is the Spouse of Mr. John A. Smith and then is also the Aunt of Billy Smith, you would want to merge the relationship record so that RE knows they are the same person).

Hope this helps
Rhonda

Rhonda,

Thank you very much for your reply!  It is a tremendous help.  I hope your integration goes well and you have a good summer.

 Thanks again,

Tracy

We have been doing integration for some time now, but have decided that parent/grandparent will have a constituant record in RE.  This makes queries easier, and IMO more accurate.  Then integration between RE/EE appears more logical and troubleshooting issues is a little easier because both DBs are similar in how they handle relationships.

We integrate; Students, Parents, Step-Parents, Grandparents and Organizations between the two systems.

The only funky things we run into are when records already exists in RE or EE when we link and then it because of address sharing can not correctly link the records - we then have to go into the offending record and fix their address sharing, etc.

We did our initial Integration with the spouses as non-constituent records in RE, linked to their individual records in EE. 
We are getting ready to implement Online Campus Community - and want to break out the spouses in RE to be their own constituents.  That way - the spouses will have their own record for event registrations and their own profile record to update.

Interesting side note - I have done some testing with a handful of spouse records by "divorcing" them in EE - (removing the spousal relationships)  The next time I run Integration I create a new constituent record for what was formerly a nonconstituent spouse in RE.  Once the new record is created, I then "re-marry" the spouses.
Here's what I am noticing - I now have constituent records in both RE and EE for Mr. Jones and Mrs. Jones.  If I make a change to a non-shared contact number in Education Edge on one of their records (cell phone, business phone, email)  - the next time I run synchronization - in RE the change appears on the Constituent Record - but NOT on the information recorded on the Spouse tab. 
I am seeing this on both husband and wife - on records that I have created and on those few spousal records that were in RE before we did Integration. 
I have a case open with support - they're still trying to decide if this is an Integration issue or an RE issue.  Either way - it's certainly an issue!

My word to the wise being - if you are just NOW starting Integration - put both spouses in RE as constituents.  As Dan said - queries are easier - and the troubleshooting is a littel easier because both DBs are handling relationships in a similar manner.
I think my problem stems from wanting to change the spouses from non-constituents to constituents after the integration has been established.  The new constituent records are not linking to their corresponding spouse records. 
We'll see where this goes.

Thank you, Candace & Dan!

The idea of changing all spouse records to constituents seems daunting but sounds like it will help in the end. 

Thanks again!

Tracy