Somewhere by the end of 2021, IIQ incorporated two new attributes for filtering user views: "Department" and "Employment Status". I remember getting exited about this because it would add really valuable information we could use to create more granular reports based on job-related attributes. however I’m finding two problems:
I don’t seem to find any evident way to map these attributes out to existing data within our SIS or Google SSO apps, or any other apps
There is no way to add "Department" or "Employment Status" columns in the user views to make this data visible
Given these shortcomings, I’m trying to understand why these attributes are even there, or perhaps I’m not understanding how to use them?
Thank you in advance for any thoughts/comments you may have to share on this
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You can map them using the Google SSO connector. You can map by Groups or OU’s. We are only mapping Departments for currently, and the best way I’ve found to do it with our setup is using Groups in the Google Admin Console, and mapping the groups I need to specific Departments.
@jclark16 Thank you for jumping in with an answer!
@jclark16@Kathryn Carter Thank you so much for your suggestion! I will definitely give this a try.
How about the “employment” field, has anyone figured out a way to use this? For us this data only lives in our SIS, not in Google. I imagine it could be added to Google via a custom field, but I wouldn’t want this type of information to become visible to the Google directory.
Also, how about displaying these as columns in the user view? Is there a way to achieve this? Sorting by department would be really useful
@jclark16@Kathryn Carter Thank you so much for your suggestion! I will definitely give this a try.
How about the “employment” field, has anyone figured out a way to use this? For us this data only lives in our SIS, not in Google. I imagine it could be added to Google via a custom field, but I wouldn’t want this type of information to become visible to the Google directory.
Also, how about displaying these as columns in the user view? Is there a way to achieve this? Sorting by department would be really useful
Employment mapping works the same way. You can probably make dynamic groups in Google for that and just map them to the different employment statuses in iiQ.
I don’t see a column option for Department when making a custom view, I think that would be a good idea to post for votes!
@jclark16 and @Daniel P check out this idea about viewing all columns and exporting them
@Kathryn Carter the idea is great! However, the problem is these two fields don’t even appear as an option in the “Add Column” drop down under “View Designer” and “Export”. I’m just wondering why they are not an option.
@jclark16 While a good idea, my fear is that basing Employment on Google Groups would add a level of complexity that I can’t bring myself to justify. I wish IIQ gave us more flexibility to map SIS fields.
@Kathryn Carter@jclark16
Hi! Just another a quick update re: mapping “Departments” to Google SSO groups:
As it turns out, we have several scenarios where staff belong to more than one departmental email groups due to messaging needs. It seems these scenarios throw IIQ off, causing the affected staff to bounce from department to department with every sync (as it was explained to me by an IIQ tech support agent).
So unfortunately the Google SSO solution won’t work for us :(
@Daniel P Thanks for following up with support! They are the real brains behind getting your specific use case questions answered.
I am sorry that Google SSO will not be a solution for you.
@Kathryn Carter@jclark16
Hi! Just another a quick update re: mapping “Departments” to Google SSO groups:
As it turns out, we have several scenarios where staff belong to more than one departmental email groups due to messaging needs. It seems these scenarios throw IIQ off, causing the affected staff to bounce from department to department with every sync (as it was explained to me by an IIQ tech support agent).
So unfortunately the Google SSO solution won’t work for us :(
Good point. We also have people that may work in various positions across multiple departments in our district. For us, we created dynamic groups in Google with attribute based membership, so whatever a member’s official department is, that’s what we named the group. These groups aren’t used as email lists, just for security/ACL purposes. So we then sync just those groups with iiQ departments for proper mapping. I’m a member of several groups myself, but I only mapped the IT one for my department mapping. Hopefully this helps. I know it can get confusing, and can be a lot of work when starting from scratch.
Old thread, but related question; it seems the list of Departments to sync is a canned list and not all listed are used in our District. Is there a way to either edit the existing departments or create new ones? I’m not finding anything obvious.
@justin_g Those are in your SSO so that setting will be on that side.
@justin_g Those are in your SSO so that setting will be on that side.
Sorry, I’m not sure what you mean. Could you please clarify?
When I look in IIQ under Google SSO > Department Mappings, I see for example, ‘Athletics’ as a custom mapping. We don’t have or use an ‘Athletics’ department (nor Legal Services, Record Services, etc), so we have nothing to map to these fields.
And I’m not finding a way in IIQ to add or edit these fields so that they are useful.
Oh I understand @justin_g I was looking at the incorrect tab.
These department mappings are not customizable:
You can map them via OU if you want to optimize your created departments. I hope this helps
@jclark specialist
What do with users that are in more than one group?
@vince we didn’t end up utilizing this too much, but I would assume that whichever group syncs last in the nightly sync is the one they’ll end up with in iiQ.
@jclark I found out, from iiQ support, its the first time the sync finds a person and sync them it ignores them after that.
