Practice Environment Provisioning Guide (IT)

This is the IT-facing companion to the Practice Environment Data Guide. Your practice environment (also called the sandbox or test environment) is a dedicated, permanent copy of Housing.Cloud, loaded with one term of your real data — the home for training, integration development, and testing throughout onboarding and beyond. Standing it up is a one-time provisioning, and IT owns two parts of it: sign-on and getting the data to us securely. The housing team prepares the data itself — they'll work from the Practice Environment Data Guide.

What IT Provides

Two things unblock provisioning; start them early, as each can have its own lead time:

• SAML metadata for single sign-on. Configure Housing.Cloud as a SAML client in your identity provider and share your metadata XML, so staff can sign in to the practice environment. Full steps are in SSO / SAML.
• The student roster (Profiles) from your SIS. The Profiles file is typically an IT or SIS-admin extract — a Banner SQL/ODS pull, a PeopleSoft PS Query, or a Colleague report — filtered to the chosen term. Housing prepares the rest, but this one usually starts with you.
• A secure way to send the data files. The CSVs reach us via an upload to Sero, an encrypted email, or SFTP — whichever fits your security posture. If you'll use SFTP, that's a 4096-bit RSA key; see SFTP Setup & Cutover. Never send raw student data over plain email.

What Gets Provisioned

Housing.Cloud stands up a private practice environment for your institution and loads it with one representative term of your data — a one-time lift-and-shift from your SIS and housing sources. It's yours permanently, so you keep using it for ongoing configuration and testing long after go-live.

The Data (In Brief)

Preparing the data is usually a shared effort. The Profiles roster typically comes from your SIS — often an IT or SIS-admin extract — while the housing team prepares Inventory, Charge Codes, and Occupancies from their own systems (plus Meal Plans if dining is in scope). However you divide it, every file must match our schemas exactly. For the how-to, see the Practice Environment Data Guide; for the column-by-column specs, see the CSV Integration Schema articles.

After Provisioning

• Staff sign in through your identity provider once SSO is configured.
• In the practice environment, file syncs are triggered manually (Import/Export Sync) — scheduled automation is a production behavior.
• The environment persists for ongoing training and testing; before go-live we'll ask for one refreshed data load so production starts current.