SEVIS Batch Transfer Tutorial - John Sequeira [contact], Swimfish Consulting

Download your SEVIS data with Swimfish's rtCapture for audits and reporting.

Summary
Introduction
Part I: You'll need to be Certified
What do you mean my ID's no good?
Yes, you do need HELP
Part II: Talking to SEVIS
Conclusion
Appendix A: Installing Free Software for Windows

Conclusion

We've covered one example of sending data to SEVIS, and hopefully that's enough to bootstrap your campus' efforts. While it might not necessarily go this smoothly for you, I don't performing the batch transfer process to be much more difficult than tweaking an XML attribute or two, and a few calls to the HELP desk. Once you've got batch under your belt, there's plenty more to learn. If you look at the whole SEVIS solution you'll see that the batch file management, data warehousing/consolidatioon, workflow and change management issues will be far more challenging than sending and receiving an XML file to INS over the internet. Even so, my hope is that by digesting this tutorial you'll have more time to spend on the bigger issues.

Acknowledgements

Very few organizations have successfully exchanged data with the INS. One of the first was Michael Ivy's team at Purdue University. Many thanks to him for providing all his guidance and inspiration on the SEVIS Readiness mailing list.

Resources

• Source Code and utilities for this tutorial   
• Versign Client Certificate
• Newfront Software's SEVIS Readiness Mailing List  
• Cygwin - With Cygwin, you can get both curl and openssl, along with many other handy Unix tools
• curl - cURL web site
• OpenSSL Website
• openssl Certificates How-To

About John Sequeira

John Sequeira is a senior IT consultant with over 10 years experience building and integrating enterprise systems. Through consulting with Newfront Software he began developing expertise in the technology behind the SEVIS program, and he has presented the technology aspects of SEVIS across the country in Newfront's SEVIS Readiness Seminars in early 2002. He now participates in the SEVIS Readiness mailing list and also runs the only technology-focused SEVIS weblog, SEVISWatch.

He works both as a freelance consultant and in conjunction with several systems integrator firms for larger, more multidisciplinary projects. If he can be of service to you in your campus' SEVIS efforts, please don't hesitate to contact him by clicking here.

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