New Features for Salesforce Higher Education (Spring '17)

I would like to thank my friend @CoreySnow to allow me to do this presentation at the Harvard Higher Education user group last week. Here are some key features which Higher education users should leverage in Spring 17.

Preventing Problem Features.

  • Recaptcha script on web to lead forms. If you are using web to lead forms on your RFI forms, the recaptcha web form validation would prevent spam leads and contacts in your salesforce
  • With the new API name for picklists available, your SIS system integrations from banner, people soft can work even if users change the picklist values on the salesforce side. They can change the labels but not the api name.
  • If you are using IE8.0, It is time to upgrade soon.

Increase Adoption

  • With more reporting capabilities on communities, your student and alumni communities can show reports on topics, number of posts on topics, articles and usage in the past 60 days. This would allow you to increase engagement by tailoring the content for the community.
  • Reports on searches not yielding results are now displayed. This would allow you to fine tune the content based on search which would eventually drive adoption in your community.
  • With pre built moderation rules available out of the box, you can kick start moderation rules on communities quickly which would help to weed out the bad actors in your community.

HEDA best practices

  • If you are planning to migrate data to HEDA, plan to use external ids from your student information systems for accounts, contacts, courses, terms and all custom objects. This would help in synchronization on multiple data loads.
  • Have a strategy to load dates for creation and modified dates.
  • Split the file into smaller chunks if your volume of students are more than 100,000 and do multiple batches.
  • If you are using targetx or enrollment rx packages, identify duplicate objects like courses, enrollments etc and decide on which object to use instead of allowing both.

I have created this deck which i used in the presentation for the Harvard user group which has more detailed listing of features for spring 17, free apps and chrome plugins. Please click here to download the presentation. Please feel free to download this deck and feel free to post your comments below or email me at buyan@eigenx.com for further questions.