Overview of MIF for Connecticut Community Colleges

The term MIF stands for Multiple Institution Functionality. This term and initial knowledge of the concept came from the University of Alaska.

The Connecticut Community Colleges had a need to run Banner Financial Aid for all 12 of its colleges. Each college in the system has it own “Institution “ code. This means that the Federal government considers them as an individual college. Not just a campus of a large school. Banner Financial Aid could not accommodate a system like ours out of the box. The software is more suited for a single four-year institution.

To make Banner Financial Aid work for the CCC’s we needed to clone 336 objects in the database 12 times. These objects consist of tables, views, database procedures, functions, packages and triggers. Each cloned object is owned by an individual schema owner. 12 schemas in all. Then a private synonym is assigned to the users based on what college they belong to. This synonym points the user to the correct cloned object for their college.

By cloning certain objects it allows each of our colleges to have a seemingly independent Financial Aid system of their own, within one database. One that is integrated with the Student and AR modules also. The Financial Aid Implementation Team did enforce a standard naming convention for some codes. Mostly only validation tables. This helped reduce the number of cloned object considerably.