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University of Colorado Replaces Harris Connect with Campus-Wide CRM-Based Solution

May 14, 2015/in Case Study, Higher Education ACF Solutions/by Josue

“We were up against a looming deadline” -Kim Egan, Electronic Communications Director, Office of the President, CU

About CU

The University of Colorado is a public research university with four campuses. CU has 35,000 employees (faculty and staff), 55,000 enrolled students, 457,000 alumni and 348,000 donors. The University of Colorado (CU) was up against a “looming” deadline, explained Kim Egan, Electronic Communications Director, Office of the President, University Relations. Their contract with Harris Connect IS Platform, a communications system that her department and over 200 campus communicators had used for their “eComm” activities — email marketing, form-building for fundraising and events, and community engagement — was ending in November 2015 and Harris Connect would be going out of service come February 2016.CU needed to find its replacement.

Challenge

Given this opportunity, Egan and her team wanted to identify a solution that would allow for more sophisticated marketing automation including advanced list segmentation and data tracking while ensuring CAN-SPAM compliance.

CU also wanted to make better use of their online community as a channel to engage alumni and other constituencies as well as to gather data. CU’s existing community, part of the Harris Connect solution, was not widely adopted because login was difficult and not user friendly. This was a big pain point for CU.

Data management and governance was also an issue. There was no seamless data process to cleanly manage the almost one million records, across three sources of data, including Campus Solutions SIS, Campus Solutions HR, and Ellucian Advance. Like most institutions, CU’s various departments worked in silos; they chose their own solutions and managed their own data. With more and more calls for a 360-degree view and more targeted engagement of constituents, Egan and her team realized that this was bigger than simply replacing Harris Connect. They needed a CRM solution that integrated the three data sources, allowing them to leverage the shared data for marketing purposes. Their initially small project became a system-wide initiative.

Solution

After a comprehensive RFP process, University of Colorado chose Salesforce to be its enterprise CRM solution. This multi-phase project, involving a university-wide roll-out across four campuses, is the first of its kind for Salesforce. ACF Solutions was selected as the implementation partner, or as Egan likes to describe ACF, “the general contractor building CU’s dream house.”

As part of Phase 1, ACF implemented Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud and Community Cloud, including the following:

  • Seamlessly integrated Marketing Cloud with Salesforce CRM, creating user accounts and building email templates.
  • Created custom-branded communities allowing alumni to find and engage with each other as well as update their profile information.
  • Created a searchable alumni directory with a highly powerful and customizable search engine.
  • Created customized constituent profile pages with field-level privacy settings.
  • Aligned and integrated three uniquely different data sources, comprising almost one million records, into Salesforce.
  • Migrated existing data from Harris Connect to Salesforce.

Results

As a result, CU now has a single platform for more highly targeted engagement of its alumni, staff, donors and students, with the plan to expand the user base and add functionality to support CU’s broad and diverse engagement imperatives.

0 0 Josue Josue2015-05-14 23:25:292021-08-20 01:52:08University of Colorado Replaces Harris Connect with Campus-Wide CRM-Based Solution

3 Reasons to Replace Harris Connect IS Platform with Salesforce CRM

April 30, 2015/in Salesforce Community Virginia Berkenkotter/by Josue

As you probably know by now, the Harris Connect IS Platform, a long-time staple of university marketing and alumni departments everywhere, is going out of service come February 2016. You need to replace its functionality — community engagement, event and email management — and fast. But, before you pull the trigger on a lateral replacement, consider a Salesforce-based solution to support your alumni engagement activities. Here’s why:

  • Better tools: Salesforce offers best-of-breed community, email marketing, advancement and events management tools that will not only replace your HC functionality, but significantly upgrade your tool set. The tools available through Salesforce and its ecosystem offer many features and advantages unmatched by HC and other stand-alone offerings, and at their core are powered by Salesforce CRM – the world’s leading platform for managing constituent relationships.
  • Better data: What bolsters your efforts to improve alumni engagement scores — and sets a Salesforce-based solution apart from other HC replacements — is having Salesforce’s powerful CRM at its core. Data drives success. Salesforce CRM pulls your various data sources into one single location to provide you a more complete picture of your alumni. A single alumnus record includes biographical and demographic data pulled from the university’s system of record and advancement system along with any new or updated data generated by native Salesforce marketing, community and event tools. As a result, this powerful data set gives you a complete picture of each alum and allows you to create targeted, relevant and unique communications, delivering the right message to the right alumnus at the right time.
  • Campus-wide expansion: As the lines between alumni and advancement blur, Salesforce CRM allows your institution to expand alumni engagement into fundraising, creating transparencies and collaboration between the two groups. And, because Salesforce CRM supports multiple constituent groups such as students, staff, parents, corporate and foundation partners, and more, it provides you the opportunity to gain a broader institutional view of the full-student lifecycle, establishing an earlier foundation for alumni engagement.

Salesforce CRM delivers increased efficiencies through powerful workflow capabilities, increased visibility via customizable reports and dashboards, and increased user adoption because the platform is mobile and social. On many campuses,Salesforce CRM is setting the new standard for alumni relations, as well as the foundation for a truly connected campus.

[To learn more about this Salesforce-based solution, watch our webinar “AlumniEngage: Leveraging Salesforce to Bolster Alumni Engagement.” ]

0 0 Josue Josue2015-04-30 23:28:072021-08-20 01:57:123 Reasons to Replace Harris Connect IS Platform with Salesforce CRM

Salesforce Lightning Process Builder (Part 1)

April 9, 2015/in ACF Solutions/by Josue

PART 1: NO CODE REQUIRED

Lightning Process Builder is a revolutionary enhancement to Salesforce, announced as part of its Spring ‘15 Release, providing an easy means to automate business processes which formerly required considerable technical resources, time and money. To quote Shelly Erceg, Salesforce Director of Product Management, “[Process Builder] puts the power of code in your hands with just a few clicks.” No technical expertise or Apex code required!

Process Builder allows Salesforce Administrators to easily and visually automate daily tasks, from the simple to the complex, with just a few clicks. This 2-minute demo underscores its ease of use. With Process Builder, you can:

  • Create a record
  • Update any related record—not just the record or its parent
  • Use a quick action to create a record, update a record, or log a call
  • Launch a flow—as an immediate or a scheduled action
  • Send an email
  • Post to Chatter
  • Submit for approval

In her online demonstration, Erceg illustrates the power of Process Builder through a simple example of automating address changes. Previously, a Salesforce Administrator would have to edit every child Contact of an Account to change the organization’s address. With Process Builder, the admin can visually create a logical series of tasks that are triggered when the Account address field is later changed.

The result being, as CTO Doug Sharpe wrote in his November 24, 2014 blog “Business at the Speed of Lightning,” that “…it will be faster and more cost-effective for companies like ACF Solutions, and our clients alike, to create solutions on Salesforce that are highly tailored, yet also easy to maintain and evolve.” In future series on this topic, we will explore ways Process Builder can solve common workflow problems in both Higher Education and Nonprofit organizations.

In the meantime, here’s information to get you started building automated workflows with Process Builder:

  • Process Builder Overview
  • Understanding the Interface
  • Limitations & Considerations
  • Creating a Process
  • Spring 2015 Release Notes
0 0 Josue Josue2015-04-09 23:29:302021-08-20 01:57:25Salesforce Lightning Process Builder (Part 1)

The Muddle in the Middle: The Importance of Engaging Your Mid-Level Donors

March 25, 2015/in Fundraising ACF Solutions/by Josue

Mid-level donors often slip through the cracks in the Advancement world. In many organizations, they represent a large swath of prospective donors — the muddle in the middle — between the Annual Giving and Major Gift giving pools and typically are not assigned to prospect portfolios. Or, if they are assigned, they may go unmanaged because there’s no expected immediate return from these donors. Prospect managers have large financial goals that can only be filled by higher impact prospects.

This begs the question of whether the muddle in the middle matters. (Say that three times fast!) They do and here’s why:

  • Mid-level donors provide a consistent and reliable income stream; their donation level ranges between $500 and $10,000.
  • Because they are habitual donors, mid-level donors are statistically more likely to include your organization in their will. Your objective is to increase that share.
  • Mid-level donors are your major donors in-waiting. It is a truism that for every major gift initiative or campaign, you need four prospects; mid-level donors fill your bottom-level of major gift prospects. You need to nurture that bottom level or their money will go elsewhere.

If you are not already nurturing your relationships with mid-level donors to build your prospect pipeline, there is no time like the present to begin. Accounting for these donors and incorporating them into your fundraising strategy does not require a sea-change in staffing. The solution is at your fingertips: Salesforce.

Next Time: How Salesforce can help you identify, target and ultimately grow your mid-level donors.

Erin Troia is a seasoned fundraising professional with 15+ years of direct progressive management experience in both the nonprofit and higher ed sectors. In August 2014, Erin brought her expertise to ACF Solutions and has worked with Columbia University, Auburn University’s Harbert College of Business, and Allegheny College.

0 0 Josue Josue2015-03-25 23:30:442021-08-20 01:57:58The Muddle in the Middle: The Importance of Engaging Your Mid-Level Donors

Innovative Solutions to Support & Improve ADA Call Center

March 20, 2015/in Case Study ACF Solutions/by Josue

“Now our backend fulfillment process is easy to learn, easy to use.” -Arlene Erskine, Managing Director, Center for Information and Community Support

About ADA

The American Diabetes Association leads the fight against the deadly consequences of diabetes and the fight for those affected by diabetes by funding research; delivering services; providing objective and credible information; and advocacy.

Challenge

The support agents at the Center for Information and Community Support (“Center”), the call center of the American Diabetes Association (ADA), provide information on diabetes as well as ADA programs, products and events, to people diagnosed with diabetes, their family members and the professionals who treat them.

In 2014, the Center handled more than 150,000 inquiries — via web chat, phone and email. Given this high volume of inquiries, the Center could no  longer trust their legacy system to support their activities. That system had not evolved since its initial implementation in 1993 and lacked basic business process automation. The Center’s backend fulfillment process was very labor intensive and required multiple manual tasks to complete the fulfillment of items. Their outdated and overly customized management system required time-consuming manual searches of their knowledge base and for the contact information of their constituents’ regional ADA offices.

When the system unexpectedly went down for a two-week period, leaving the Center without a back-up, the time had arrived for a new solution that, according to Managing Director Arlene Erskine, could be “adapted to our processes and requirements — and have a back-up in place.” The Center could not afford to be without their case and knowledge management system again.

Solution

After a thorough review of major call center players, American Diabetes Association selected Salesforce.com as its CRM and ACF Solutions as its implementation partner. Over the 20-week project, including extensive requirements gathering, ACF implemented Salesforce Service Cloud and Salesforce Knowledge to create an integrated call center solution that would be responsive across all channels and address the specific business needs of the ADA. ACF Solutions implemented the following functionality as part of the new core solution:

  • Implemented and configured Salesforce Service Cloud to track and manage constituent inquiries via phone, email and web chat through contact and case records.
  • Implemented and configured Salesforce Knowledge for ADA’s centralized knowledge base on diabetes information, membership, training materials, web links and more, allowing support agents to quickly hone their search through keywords entered in the case subject line, and within the case view.
  • Setup email-to-case functionality, allowing agents to respond directly from a case and for constituents to reply.
  • Automated the process of importing kit order requests to the Center for fulfillment by the Center’s team.
  • Implemented and extended Salesforce Live Agent by creating a pre-chat form with a duplicate checking functionality and a post-chat survey form to capture key constituent information for demographic analysis and improved services.
  • Configured a custom solution to match constituents to the appropriate Regional ADA Office based on their zip code. This allowed the call center agent to proactively provide the constituent key event and contact information for their regional office.
  • Implemented Conga Composer and Conductor to streamline the order fulfillment and inventory management processes.

Results

Five months post-implementation, the Center for Information and Community Support reports (1) improved productivity where call center agents now have access to and maintain a comprehensive searchable knowledge-base and local ADA offices directory; (2) faster fulfillment of product orders; (3) simplified processes such that any person could now step into the order fulfillment role easily; (4) reduced call-handling time; and (5) the Center has not experienced any downtime since Salesforce was implemented.

0 0 Josue Josue2015-03-20 20:19:072021-08-20 01:58:11Innovative Solutions to Support & Improve ADA Call Center

Highlights from the Higher Ed Summit 2015

February 26, 2015/in Higher Education Alanna Steffens/by Josue

What a wonderful time I had in sunny Miami attending Salesforce Foundation’s 2015 Higher Education Summit hosted by the University of Miami. This year’s theme was “Community Reimagined.” The Summit brought together over 700 staff from Higher Ed institutions looking to engage their constituents at every point in the lifecycle. Participants enjoyed two days of great presentations on how peer institutions are using community and communication solutions to engage their constituents. Here are my highlights from the Advancement Track at #HESummit2015:

Get Internal Buy-in for Alumni Engagement Success

As Kim Egan from the University of Colorado and Emily Morris and Mickey Mossaidis from Columbia University shared in their presentation “Alumni Communication and Community”, the idea of reinventing a single enterprise alumni engagement approach did not emerge overnight. Both institutions shared about their efforts from getting buy-in to selecting the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, and Sales Cloud, to creating the right internal team. Considerable time was spent to get the necessary support from all the affected players to build a unified and engaging solution. The speakers stressed that they needed to remain flexible in their approach and consider the structure of the organization to get results.

Be Transparent

In “Innovating with Advancement Connect,” Tracey Vranich and Al Checcio from the University of Southern California shared their experience leveraging the Salesforce and Advancement Connect platforms to support their aggressive $6 billion campaign. As part of their onboarding and change management strategy, USC reached out to the advancement offices of its different schools, to communicate vision and secure buy-in for this enterprise advancement solution. This early work helped to create transparency in the process, as well as create trust with the advancement officers and other users in the long-term benefits to them of the solution. The key message here: engage your community openly and often to support effective change!

Make A Plan!

With so many areas to consider when starting a Salesforce project, the session led by Georgetown University on building a roadmap to support your implementation was instrumental. Jennifer Walker described this process as most often starting with a “Coalition of the Willing” to:

  • identify the pain points
  • establish objectives
  • document key processes
  • prioritize against University objectives
  • and define success metrics.

The session went on to highlight the three key areas needed to start building a roadmap: (1) creating a governance structure; (2) building the roadmap, and (3) developing a resource plan. The audience was asked to then rate their organization’s preparedness in each of the three categories. This hands-on activity allowed participants to start generating a plan of action for use upon returning to their institutions. There was a lot of energy and participation in the room. It was clear this was an important topic for all.

I’m looking forward to more great moments like these at next year’s Higher Ed Summit, March 30-April 1, 2016 at Tulane University.

0 0 Josue Josue2015-02-26 00:33:522021-08-20 01:58:38Highlights from the Higher Ed Summit 2015

7 Best Practices for a Successful Salesforce Implementation

February 12, 2015/in Best Practices, Higher Education, Salesforce, Salesforce Community ACF Solutions/by Olivia Pycha

Having done your due diligence in selecting Salesforce for Higher Ed as your institution’s CRM platform, it is time to prepare for implementation. Your institution’s readiness will be the difference between a successful and unsuccessful deployment. Implementation is not a simple pull of the switch, but rather a process that may start prior to CRM selection and continue after launch. ACF Solutions has completed hundreds of Salesforce implementations and has gathered these best practices that will ensure a productive and successful implementation for you and your school.

1. Plan, plan, and plan some more.

Planning is key to a successful implementation. In this early stage, involve staff members from any affected departments and most importantly key prospective Salesforce users; understand their pain points, business objectives, needs and wants. This analysis will allow you and your team to re-think and improve existing business processes. Know and expect that, while your requirements gathering and planning may be comprehensive, it will never be 100%. So do the analysis, but don’t let it lead to paralysis.

2. Think big, start small.

Given Salesforce’s innovative technology, you may be tempted to implement Salesforce across your institution ALL at once, but do not. Use an iterative or phased approach to implement an enterprise Salesforce solution. To borrow from CTO John Carpenter of Georgetown University McDonough School of Business, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Start with one or two departments; select a department with staff members identified as early adopters or a revenue-generating department such as student recruitment or executive education. Then build upon your initial success and leverage key learnings such as user adoption strategies as you move forward. Let each phase build upon the successes and lessons learned from the prior phases.

3. Identify an internal project manager early.

This is a no-brainer; identify someone early in the process to keep the proverbial wheels moving. An implementation of this nature necessarily involves a detailed project scope, multiple deadlines, and a defined budget and needs to be effectively managed internally. That person may be someone with project management experience from the IT management office or perhaps a business analyst from a functional team. The project manager keeps their own team on track, helps to coordinate internal resources, and supports project collaboration. This greatly increases the chances of your project being on time and on budget!

4. Engage your stakeholders from the start.

Salesforce is a transformative technology, but only if your users adopt the technology. You cannot assume it will happen organically. Change is hard. Employees may have invested years in the current systems with which they work or have suffered burnout from past technology failures. You need to develop user adoption strategies from the start of your CRM project to gain their trust and buy-in. For example, involve stakeholders in the initial requirements gathering and later in user testing; identify and empower early adopters as technology champions; communicate to all levels; and celebrate the wins. Change management doesn’t end upon launch. Continue to grow adoption with post-implementation check-ins and surveys, new and refresher training, and readily available technical support. In his 2015 Dreamforce session, CTO Carpenter recalled several instances in which “Salesforce could have failed on a micro-level” if the school had not employed an “aggressive helpdesk model.” Show this kind of love to your users, and you’ll get the kind of adoption that leads to success.

5. Good data is everything.

The goal of Salesforce is to bring your various data sources (e.g., Banner, ApplyYourself, Excel sheets, PeopleSoft, etc.) into one central location to make the right data available to the right people at the right time in a way that they can use. However, getting the right data into Salesforce is critical and can be a key challenge. Effective data integration requires an up-front and thoughtful analysis of your current data sources, specific data needs, frequency of data exchanges, unique record keys and more. Salesforce is a system of engagement. Effective engagement requires data that tells you who to engage with, when and how. Once your data sources are identified, make a plan as to how that data gets into your system. (Do not expect users to type in the data!) Having the clean and complete data in the system when you go live will increase user adoption, create efficiencies and improve future data collection. The cleanliness of your data will be an ongoing challenge. Your data must continue to be visible and open to your users. If not, user adoption is threatened. Most higher education institutions already have data governance plans in place, including data cleansing and data security. If yours does not, you will need to establish data entry and stewardship rules and processes.

6. Knowledge is power.

The more your users and technical team know about Salesforce, the better your results. Develop opportunities internally and externally to grow your team’s knowledge base.

  • Take advantage of the trainings and certifications offered by Salesforce.
  • Build internal expertise by offering supplemental training sessions.
  • Share knowledge through Chatter, Salesforce’s built-in community.
  • Introduce your users to Higher Ed communities on Salesforce’s ‘Power of Us’ Hub.
  • Encourage attendance at Salesforce and Salesforce Foundation conferences and webinars for the opportunity to ask questions, network, and learn how other higher education institutions have solved problems using Salesforce.
  • Take advantage of your implementation partner’s expertise to transfer knowledge to you and your users.

7. Don’t go it alone.

Salesforce offers an amazing CRM platform to the higher ed sector. But it does not offer implementation services. Finding the right partner to help implement Salesforce is up to you. Give careful consideration to the partner you choose. The road to enterprise CRM success is long, and it will invariably be bumpy. Even with the most careful planning and preparation, unforeseen challenges can arise. You will want a trusted advisor beside you who has traveled this road before and has a proven track record of success in higher ed.  

Attain Partners – Salesforce Experts

No matter if your organization is beginning its Salesforce journey or 10+ years into development, Attain Partners is here to help you achieve your digital transformation goals.

Contact us

To learn more, check out our Salesforce Innovation services, read case studies about our work, and explore blog posts from Attain Partners’ Salesforce team.

Salesforce Innovation
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https://attainpartners.com/wp-content/uploads/Newsletter-Graphic_2023-09_Salesforce-to-Raisers-Edge-scaled.webp 1366 2560 Olivia Pycha Olivia Pycha2015-02-12 00:34:532024-02-15 17:21:007 Best Practices for a Successful Salesforce Implementation

Innovation is Business-Critical for WPI Advancement Team

January 27, 2015/in Case Study, Fundraising, Higher Education ACF Solutions/by Josue

“Collaboration isn’t just nice, it’s necessary.”
-Cheryl Ann Cerny, Senior Director of Advancement Information Management & Research

About WPI

Worcester Polytechnic Institute is a technological university dedicated to the technical arts and applied sciences, located in Worcester, Massachusetts, with approximately 6,000 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students.

Challenge

The Division of University Advancement at Worcester Polytechnic Institute was facing challenges with their legacy advancement database. Communication within the team was a “huge issue,” as Cheryl Ann Cerny, Senior Director of Advancement Information Management & Research at WPI, described in her presentation at Dreamforce 2014. Information needed to be more accessible.

According to Cerny, “We needed to make sure that we had an environment for our fundraisers to quickly communicate with each other so that we could keep everything moving at a fast pace and not lose any opportunity.” They needed a system that would enable them to work smarter and collaborate in order to successfully vie for limited fundraising dollars in New England’s competitive higher-education rich environment. Innovation was business-critical for the WPI advancement team.

Solution

After considerable research and requirements gathering by Cerny and others, WPI selected Salesforce.com as its enterprise-wide CRM and ACF Solutions as its implementation partner. The advancement team would be the first division on campus to move to Salesforce and was joined by the Academic and Corporate Development Division. Over the course of a 12 week project, ACF implemented Salesforce to support donor, prospect, and proposal management for WPI’s gift officers, and trained the team to use the new system. ACF also helped WPI extend Salesforce to meet several of WPI’s key challenges around effective data sharing and governance, without compromising native software. By taking this approach, ACF was able to build a solution customized to WPI’s specific business needs that could still be easily upgraded and maintained by the University. Some components of this solution included:

  • Implemented and configured Salesforce’s Advancement Connect product to provide Advancement specific functionality.
  • Configured a custom sharing solution that allowed for complex opportunity ownership, greater transparency with fundraising goals and metrics and automated communication rules across current staff, former staff, and faculty.
  • Automated key processes throughout the major donor life cycle to increase collaboration and reduce staff processing time.
  • Extended the native Salesforce security model to allow for granular access to confidential information across the team.

Results

Only 3 months post-implementation, the WPI advancement team reports greater staff efficiency, collaboration and visibility into their opportunities, with all of the relevant and necessary data pulled into one record through native Salesforce tools and customized objects. This initial implementation also set the foundation for implementing CRM institution-wide. WPI and ACF are presently working on Phase Two of the implementation.

0 0 Josue Josue2015-01-27 23:15:322021-08-20 01:59:41Innovation is Business-Critical for WPI Advancement Team

Business at the Speed of Lightning

November 3, 2014/in Doug Sharpe/by Josue

Many new capabilities were announced under the “Lightning” umbrella at Dreamforce 2014. From my perspective, the most exciting of these is the Lightning User Interface (UI) framework. It is the way that we will all be building custom user interfaces for Salesforce a year from now. It was nice knowing you, Visualforce.

What is the Lightning UI Framework?

The Lightning UI framework is composed of three main capabilities:

  • Lightning Components – pieces of user interface (tiny to huge) that include both the look-and-feel and the logic
  • Lightning Extensions – the ability to replace pieces of the standard Salesforce1 user interface with another built or purchased Component
  • Lightning App Builder – visual tool to assemble Component-based apps

For us techies, there are a lot of cool technical innovations to be excited about in the Lightning framework. At Dreamforce, listening to Doug Chasman, the principal architect of the framework, talk about some of the really impressive software engineering they have accomplished almost brought tears to my eyes. Seriously.

However, there is much more to the Lightning UI framework than a state of the art programming architecture. This is a monumental shift in the approach Salesforce customers and partners will employ to create and tailor their Salesforce CRM experience and build custom apps.

Mobile First

You have undoubtedly heard the term “mobile first” in app development circles. It means that we should think about and build for a mobile use case first – because that is increasingly how people are primarily or exclusively interacting with apps. Unfortunately, much of the business systems world is still desktop first; mobile responsiveness is a second thought. Well, Salesforce has definitely gone mobile first with Lightning. First of all, they built the Salesforce1 mobile app itself using Lightning. And the Lightning Extensions and App Builder capabilities are initially focused on phone/tablet apps — and only later will they be extended to desktop! Under the covers many of the technical attributes of the framework are designed to optimize the mobile experience, including minimizing data transfer (for faster page loads and reduced usage of our mobile data plans) and taking advantage of the mobile device’s computing power.

Lighting Components – More Assembling, Less Coding

Sure, we will be able to custom program our own Lightning components, but the real vision is that we will for the most part assemble apps using the Lightning App Builder from a palette of 1,000+ Salesforce-provided components as well as free and paid components that will be available from ISVs on the AppExchange.

And that is what has me excited about Lightning. Increasingly, what used to require a developer skill set will be achievable by lesser mortals. That means it will be faster and more cost-effective for companies like ACF Solutions, and our clients alike, to create solutions on Salesforce that are highly tailored, yet also easy to maintain and evolve. Lightning is one giant leap forward for the Salesforce mantra of “clicks, not code.”

At first glance this sounds too good to be true. The reason it is likely to become reality is that Salesforce Engineering is now using Lightning to build Salesforce itself. Not only is Salesforce1 mobile built on Lightning, but so are all of the newer UI elements in the desktop app including Opportunity Splits and Process Builder. And Salesforce is planning to rebuild the entire desktop experience using Lightning over time. A reusable component architecture is key to their engineering strategy – and we customers and partners will benefit from that.

Lightning Extensions – Make Salesforce CRM Your Own

Today, some Salesforce customers use the platform to create complex custom apps. However, most are traditional sales or service organizations who just want to tailor the standard CRM functionality to their desires. Lightning Extensions are going to make a big impact for those folks.

The Salesforce platform is famous for easy declarative configuration, including a simple page layout editor to arrange fields via drag-and-drop. Sometimes though, admins run up to “the Visualforce cliff” — meaning that to meet a small customization requirement, they must start from scratch and replace the whole page with custom Visualforce.

With Lightning Extensions, you will be able to target just a piece of the standard UI for replacement – down to an individual field. So for example, if you want to show a small graphic such as a pie chart or thermometer in place of a numeric field, you will be able to just swap out that field. Today, you would need to recreate the entire page and all of its unmodified fields in Visualforce. This evolution will make tailoring CRM much easier.

Check it Out

Lightning Components are currently available in beta in developer orgs. So if you are a developer, you can start getting up to speed on them now. Lightning App Builder and Extensions are in pilot, so declarative admins will need to wait until the next release to kick the tires on those. You can learn more about the framework at:https://developer.salesforce.com/lightning

0 0 Josue Josue2014-11-03 01:07:012021-08-20 02:00:01Business at the Speed of Lightning

Higher Ed Clients Speaking at Dreamforce 2014

October 11, 2014/in Higher Education Doug Sharpe/by [email protected]

Three of our Higher Education clients will be speaking at Dreamforce 2014. If you are attending, please consider adding these sessions to your agenda.

John Carpenter, Taira Crockett & Jesse Avila, Georgetown McDonough School of Business

Cutting Through Chaos: How Georgetown MSB Connects Processes on the Platform

When: Monday, October 13, 1:30PMWhere: Century Theaters, Theater 7

Gerald Bridwell, Smith College

Leveraging Next-Gen Marketing Automation Toolsin Higher Ed

When: Wednesday, October 15, 1PMWhere: Palace Hotel, Twin Peaks

Cheryl Cerny, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Salesforce Higher Ed Advancement: Fundraising for the 21st Century

When: Thursday, October 16, 9AMWhere: Marriott Marquis, Nob Hill

0 0 [email protected] [email protected]2014-10-11 00:08:202023-06-16 13:10:35Higher Ed Clients Speaking at Dreamforce 2014
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