Joining via in-house mobility software

Owned by Paul Leys
Last updated: 11 Jan 24
4 min read

This page explains how a higher education institution that hold an Erasmus Charter for Higher Education (ECHE) can join the Erasmus Without Paper network. Organisational units of a given higher education institution (faculties, departments) or consortia are not allowed to connect to the network separately.

Below is a detailed overview of the different steps that need to be taken during this procedure.

Step-by-step

As a first step it is important to understand the basics (different scenario's for joining Erasmus Without Paper, the mobility process cut into pieces) of the Erasmus Without Paper infrastructure and apply it to the management of mobility processes at your own institution.

The implementation of Erasmus Without Paper in your in-house software needs to be done by your IT team. We encourage you to involve them in the process right from the beginning. They will be responsible for developing the APIs that connect your own system to the system of your partner via the Erasmus Without Paper network using the communication protocols.

Your IT team will have two important tasks:

  1. They have to connect your in-house software to the Erasmus Without Paper Network. This is a mainly technical task and there is a lot of documentation available on how to connect. You can redirect them to the EWP developers page and a special Github repository;

  2. The existing business processes will need to be redesigned once data can be directly exchanged with the partners. This is a task where both the IT-team and the IRO (as business process owners) should be involved (also see step 5).

  1. As a first step some basic APIs should be implemented by your IT team (the so-called Primary Network APIs: Echo, Institutions, Organizational Units).

  2. As a second step it is important to align the developments with the targets from the European Commission and the National Agencies. Contact your National Agency for more information.

The full entry procedure is described below.

Entry procedure

The so-called EWP-administrator from the institution looking to join the Erasmus Without Paper network, will need to login to the registration portal where she/he will need to add a signed Collaboration Agreement and add the url to the so-called manifest file.

Start exchanging via Erasmus Without Paper

Upon completion of the 4 steps above, the higher education institution is added to the Erasmus Without Paper registry (this can take some time) and becomes part of the Erasmus Without Paper network. The higher education institution can start exchanging data via Erasmus Without Paper in their production environment. They need to use the functionalities provided by their in-house system. 

As part of their obligations, software providers agree not to add additional APIs to their production manifest file before they have released these new APIs in the development environment and tested them with the reference implementation.

Revocation

One should keep in mind that things can go wrong. When institutions violate the use of the Erasmus Without Paper network, there should be an exit strategy. Institutions can report incidents and complain about the quality of APIs of any particular institution, the unavailability of a server, partners that are not trustworthy, etc via the ESCI Service Desk. The EWP Governance structure will try to settle disputes and has the authority to exclude any institution from the production registry if needed. The institution will need to prove its ability and trustworthiness again in the development environment. In cases of extreme violation the EWP governance structure has the competence to temporally exclude an institution from the Erasmus Without Paper production network.