Encompass Data Connect Hosted - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Encompass Data Connect Hosted utilizes cloud infrastructure to give Encompass users low latency access to all their loan data via a customer-specific and securely isolated Snowflake account.

Since the loan data is available on a top-of-the-line analytical data store, this allows our customers to realize some of the most common use cases:

• Direct access to data with no extra replication

• Create custom views

• Data sharing

• Run analytical queries on loan dataset

• Operational business intelligence using hosted analytics

• Offloading reporting activity to a separate server

• Offloading query and/or analytics activity to a separate server

To host your Encompass instance on Encompass Data Connect, contact your account representative to initiate a provisioning request.

The provisioning process takes up to one week to complete and is as follows:

• Provisioning Request - Two to four days after your account representative initiates a provisioning request, ICE Mortgage Technology will send a welcome email to the address you provided during initiation. This Welcome email contains a link to the Encompass Data Connect website.

• Log into Encompass Data Connect - Click the link in your Welcome email to log in to Encompass Data Connect. From the log in screen, enter the Instance ID (i.e., the ID of your Encompass instance), your Encompass user ID, and your Encompass password.

  • The Instance ID is your Encompass SmartClient ID, which is provided by your Encompass administrator. (It is not the Client ID found under Help > About Encompass in Encompass). Example SmartClient ID: BE111XXXXX.

In order to access Encompass Data Connect, you must have permission to log in to Encompass with the admin user ID, or be assigned the Super Administrator or Administrator persona

• Provisioning Request Form - Upon logging in, if you haven't yet been provisioned, you will be shown the Provisioning Request form to fill out and submit.

In the Provisioning Request Form, enter the following:

• Email – Email address to which the provisioning statuses are emailed. Use commas to separate multiple email addresses.

• Database User Name - Your desired Snowflake account user name to connect to the database

• Database Password - Your desired Snowflake account password to connect to the database. This password must be a minimum of 12 characters with at least one lowercase and uppercase character, one number, and one of these characters: #, !, &, or %.

• IP Address Range - The IP address range allowed to access the Encompass Data Connect Hosted instance. Use commas to separate multiple IP addresses. Use the subnet mask of "/32" for an individual IP address.

• Data Sharing – This information is intended for Encompass Data Connect Hosted clients who already have their own company Snowflake account or clients who are in active discussions with Snowflake to spin up their own Snowflake account. If there are no Snowflake account details to provide, skip this section, and then click the Submit button to submit the Provisioning Request Form for provisioning.

  • Cloud Provider – AWS is the only supported Cloud provider for Encompass Data Connect Hosted 20.2. If your Snowflake account details are outside of the AWS Cloud provider, skip this section, and then click the Submit button to submit the Provisioning Request Form for provisioning.

  • Snowflake Region – If your Snowflake Cloud provider is AWS, then select your company’s Snowflake Region from the drop-down list.

  • On/Off Toggle – Snowflake clients can share their Hosted Views to their Company’s Snowflake account. Click the toggler to select On to enable data sharing upon provisioning.

  • Snowflake Account Name – If the Data Sharing check box has been selected, the Snowflake Account Name field will be enabled. In order to deploy the data share to your Snowflake account, provide the Snowflake Account Name here. If Data Sharing has not been enabled, then the Snowflake Account Name field will remain disabled and it will not be required for provisioning.

• Connection Details - After receiving your completed Provisioning Request Form, ICE Mortgage Technology will create an Encompass Data Connect Hosted instance. It can take up to seven days to complete creation. Once complete, ICE Mortgage Technology will email you the connection details for your Encompass Data Connect Hosted instance including DB server URL, Database Name and Schema.

After receiving the Provisioning Request Form, ICE Mortgage Technology will create an Encompass Data Connect Hosted environment. It can take up to seven days for the creation to complete. Once complete, ICE Mortgage Technology will email you the following connection details for your Encompass Data Connect Hosted environment:

• Customer ID: Encompass Client ID

• Instance ID: The ID of your Encompass instance. The Instance ID is your Encompass SmartClient ID, which is provided by your Encompass administrator. (It is not the Client ID found under Help > About Encompass in Encompass). Example SmartClient ID: BE111XXXXX.

• Endpoint: Database endpoint

• DB Engine: Snowflake

• Warehouse: Name of your warehouse

• DB Name: Name of your database

• Schema: Name of Schema of database

• Role: Role of the user added during provisioning of your instance

Using the provided information, you can use BI reporting tools (Tableau, Power BI, etc) to connect to your Snowflake Account and view their records. You can also use SQL Workbench/J by following the steps provided here or Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler (SDDM) by following the steps provide here.

For details, view the Connecting to Encompass Data Connect Hosted guide.

Encompass Data Connect Hosted allows one user assigned with the View role during the provisioning process. Users may be assigned the View or View Author role through the User Management tab on the Data Connect portal.

• View role – This is the default role assigned to users during provisioning. This role has read-only access to schemas.

• View Author role - This role has author privileges in the Custom View schema, where the user can define custom views.

use role {YOUR_ENCOMPASS_INSTANCE_ID}_VIEW_ROLE;

-- ex: use role debe11170913_VIEW_ROLE;

use warehouse {YOUR_ENCOMPASS_INSTANCE_ID}_READ_WAREHOUSE;

-- ex: use warehouse debe11170913_READ_WAREHOUSE;

use database {YOUR_ENCOMPASS_INSTANCE_ID}_DB;

-- ex: use database debe11170913_DB;

use schema VIEW_SCHEMA;

select count(*) from loan;

select loan_id, loan_number, modified_utc from loan where loan_number='xxxxxxx';

Yes. To create Custom views (non-materialized views only), make sure the user is assigned with the View Author role. These View Author users can create, update, or delete views in the Custom View schema only. The Custom View schema is available in your database. Both View users and View Author users can query custom views.

Once provisioned, Encompass Data Connect Hosted adds three years of historical data. If you would like to access additional historical data, contact ICE Mortgage Technology Technical Support with the exact dates.

In contrast with Encompass Data Connect Standard/Lite, you should not expect noticeable degradation of performance while loading historical data.

Data Sharing enables ICE Mortgage Technology to share loan data through secure views with Data Connect Hosted clients who have their own Snowflake account. With this data share, clients can query Data Connect Hosted data, along with their own data sources, within their own Snowflake account. ICE Mortgage Technology offers our mutual Snowflake clients utilizing the AWS cloud provider with the ability to receive the Data Connect Hosted data share in their Snowflake environment.

To learn more about Data Sharing and to determine eligibility, please refer to the Encompass Data Connect Hosted Data Sharing user guide.

Custom fields are stored in the table "customfields". Each field is stored as values in a row. To query values in "customfield", the table must be filtered by that custom field and loan_number.

Example: "California_id" is a custom field of type "String".

To get value of this custom field, the query can be:

select string_value from customfield where custom_field_id = ‘California_id' where loan_number="SMPLLOAN123";

Ensure the following:

• Your IP Address matches one of the IP addresses listed on the IP Management screen provided on the Administration Settings tab.
• The network administrator for your organization has opened the firewall to traffic on ports 443 and 80 as indicated in the following documentation.

If you are still encountering access issues, contact ICE Mortgage Technology Technical Support.

Loan changes are batched and uploaded into your Encompass Data Connect Hosted instance several times throughout the day. At times, due to high volumes or partial failures, delays can occur.

If after 30 minutes the data still hasn't updated, or if you experience frequent delays, contact ICE Mortgage Technology Technical Support.

There are multiple reasons for this, but it does not necessarily mean that your data is not getting synced in near real-time:

Loan folder: Since Loan Folder is the metadata and is not part of the Loan file, Data Connect gets the updates for Loan Folder using a parallel process that is not related to the Loan File. This is like moving a file to a different folder on your computer, which does not update the timestamp on the file but only moves the file. Similarly, when a loan is moved there is no update to the ModifiedUTC but DC_Modified is updated since it is an update in the database, Example: user makes changes to the loan on 11/11/2019, now ModifiedUTC and DC_Modified are same but when user moves it to a new folder on 11/13/2019 the ModifiedUTC remains old value of 11/11/2019 but DC_Modified will get updated to 11/13/2019.

Miscellaneous: At times Encompass will treat certain tasks after a loan has been opened but closed without any changes or save. These could include printing out forms for example. In this case, Data Connect DC_Modified is updated but since the loan hasn’t changed, the Modifiedutc is not updated so you can see a gap of days or weeks or even longer.

Latency: In some cases, the system may be running slowly and have issues. This is usually identified when the latency is considerably long but it usually catches up and impacts all loans, not selectively. If your loans are taking more than an hour, then please check Status Center and if there is no existing issue then contact Technical Support to open a case.

Data Connect holds data for all Encompass customers in a common infrastructure. When a loan is created in any time zone, it will be converted into UTC.

• Data Connect does not store customer-specific time zones. The same customer may have branches across 50 states and Data Connect does not store a separate time zone for each one.
• Data Connect cannot assign a time zone based on the parent company location.

Data Connect uses PST and UTC only. Customers can convert to the target time zone as needed.

• CreatedUTC is the loan created time in Encompass.
• DCModifiedUTC is every time when this is loan updated in Data Connect.

The performance of your queries could be affected by multiple factors, please try the following options if possible:

• Reduce the number of joined tables.
• Reduce the qualified dataset, by narrowing a time range, and adding more filtering conditions.

If none of this work, and you still find a particular query taking more time, contact ICE Mortgage Technology Technical Support with the query details.

In Data Connect, click Help to be taken to the Resource Center, where you can access Technical Support. (In order to access Technical Support features, you must be a named Support contact.