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Salesforce Education Summit 2022 Highlights and Key Takeaways

Authors: Nick Van Haeften and Punya Dutta Bhardwaj

This year’s Salesforce Education Summit, held virtually from April 20th-22nd, marked the event’s 10th anniversary. It was co-hosted with Arizona State University, and once again featured speakers, sessions, and updates relating to education and Salesforce Education Cloud.

Key speakers included:

  • Malala Yousafzai – Nobel Peace Prize Laurete, Activist, and Author
  • Rob Acker – CEO of Salesforce.org
  • Michael Crow – President, Arizona State University
  • Blake Leeper – Paralympic Medalist
  • Jason Belland – VP, Education Cloud Industry Solutions, Salesforce.org
  • Susan Morrow – VP/GM, Education Cloud, Salesforce.org

Highlights and Takeaways

Here are 4 noteworthy things from sessions, including some features for future release. While Salesforce keeps things general with details and dates, these features are worth looking out for.

Also included are some university-specific use cases, that focused on interesting ways to use the Salesforce Education Cloud platform.

  1. The Data Mover Closed Pilot.

This is a feature we were able to test firsthand. It’s a staging system that links student information easily from Salesforce to commonly used support systems, such as an organization’s SIS.

  • While properly integrated systems will already have 2-way data flow, Data Mover better supports this with complex mapping and duplicate prevention.

Think of it as a better, faster way to move complex files or lots of information, which can also be used to easily migrate data from legacy systems.

  1. Tableau for Higher Education

If you’re familiar with Salesforce’s dashboards, this goes well beyond normal dashboard functionality.

  • It makes sure important data is front and center, and able to have more of an impact by showing what’s relevant for specific teams like Admissions, Student Success, or the Office of the President.

Visual representation of metrics and information will be presented in a very clear and precise way, with more options for display.

  1. Expansion of Admissions Connect Offerings

There are some big changes coming for Admissions Connect, to things like:

  • Applications, admissions, and processing—including some handy tools like GPA conversion and auto-admit.

In light of these changes, to ensure maximum value for our clients, we’re currently reviewing our own Admissions Connect offerings. We will be reaching out to our current clients with updates on what these changes mean for them as soon as we get more information from Salesforce.

  1. Arizona State University and University of Miami Use Cases

These were two breakout sessions with some interesting use cases.

  • Arizona State University showcased its use of Slack (which will also be getting an update to include Student Success Alerts) for things like student onboarding and campus tours.
  • The University of Miami presented a solution for repeatable case management, which consolidates the numerous inboxes students send questions to, and then creates student-associated cases.
    • Cases are only viewable by the correct departments based on triggers and permissions.

It was great to see the configuration of the platform and tools in action on this scale. Personally, our teams love getting creative and making solutions go further, so it’s great to see more Higher Ed organizations embracing extended functionality.

Summit Recap

Obviously, there was a lot more going on at this year’s summit than we’re able to talk about here. If you’d like to discuss the event or what to expect from Salesforce and its Higher Ed offerings in 2022, contact us.