Synergetic Community Portal Integration

Schoolbox has a mechanism to integrate and allow parents to transparently login to Synergetic Community Portal via Schoolbox. The Synergetic Community Portal will be embedded within an iframe so the parent will maintain the navigation and style of the existing Schoolbox deployment.

On this page, you will find the following information:

Getting Started

Configure

Deep Linking To Community Portal

To begin, you will need the URL of the community portal and to ensure that all your parents have accounts in both Schoolbox and Community Portal with the same passwords.

There are three types of authentication possible in Synergetic Community Portal. Schoolbox handles each type differently to attempt Single-Sign On (SSO).

Web Form

Synergetic stores the password for each user within the Synergetic Database. Schoolbox uses form injection to complete the Single-Sign On and so requries the passwords stored in Schoolbox and Synergetic Community Portal to be the same for the user.

When a user changes their password in Schoolbox, or uses the forgotten password reset, the password will be set in both Schoolbox and Synergetic, keeping them in sync.

However to start out there are two options:

1. Preload users into Schoolbox with the same password as in Synergetic Community Portal.
2. Ask user to login to Schoolbox for the first time using the forgotten password reset process, which will set the password in Schoolbox for the first time and change the Synergetic Community Portal password to match.

SAML

Mostly there should be no changes to support this as long as both Schoolbox and Synergetic Community Portal are using SAML for authentication and both are connected to the same Identity Provider.

If you are having trouble logging into Community Portal from Schoolbox with SAML and ADFS, please try enabling the "Enable Community Portal Launcher" under Admin > Settings > External DB from within Schoolbox.  Typically you will see in the browser console (Refused to display xxxx in a frame because it set 'X-Frame-Options' to 'deny'. This means the identity provider does not support SAML being embedded in an iframe.  The launcher will launch the SAML login window in a tab, before redirecting the user into Community Portal.

LDAP based basic authentication

We are unable to support SSO when Synergetic Community Portal is using this method.

However, since in this case users credentials are already in LDAP/AD, this is a prime candidate to move to SAML based authentication using the same LDAP backend.

To setup the link:

1. Login as a Superuser and navigate to the admin system. In the Admin system browse to 'Settings' tab, then the 'External DB' section.

2. Paste your full Community portal URL including the http or https into the External DB Portal URL.

3. The last step is to provide the link to parents. In the Side Menu tab, add a new item titled 'Student Management' or whatever you choose and link it to '/synergetic'. See Side Menu if you have any trouble with this step. 

You can now set up direct links to specific areas in the community portal using deep linking.

This can be used by appending the /synergetic URL that is used for accessing the community portal with the area that you wish to direct them to;

E.g:

/synergetic/attendances to access the Attendances

/synergetic/fin to access the Financials

/synergetic/absences to access the Absences

You can use other areas by taking the name of community portal page after /login.aspx?returnPage= in the URL and removing off the .aspx extension.

So for example contact page would be:

/synergetic/contact

 Instead of:

/login.aspx?returnPage=contact.aspx