Along with a focus on admissions, advancement and marketing, this year’s Higher Ed Summit solidified the use of HEDA in the higher education space. While only a year old, the support from the community and Salesforce directly has come a long way to provide a solid base to build on.
Lightning Experience
Meant as an improvement and replacement to the classic Salesforce UI, over the last year this framework has been updated to offer a better user experience by allowing admins and developers to create components and even apps that can be used to extend base Salesforce features. Then you can make your components available in Salesforce1, Lightning Experience, and Communities.
If you haven’t already made the switch away from the classic UI, you should plan to do so soon. The Lightning Experience is also taking an app-centric approach which will allow you to update only parts of the page.
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HEDA
HEDA, Higher Ed Data Architecture, is a set of Salesforce objects, triggers and flows that allow you to define common actors and relationships in a Higher Ed environment. You can capture how users are connected to each other, courses and programs.
To install HEDA, you’ll need to have the Lightning Experience already enabled. Then find HEDA in the Appexchange and follow the install instructions.
A word of caution, be sure to test first in a sandbox to determine any upgrades or changes to you’re existing organization before installing HEDA.
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Additional Resources
Power of Us Hub is a resource and community to find answers. If you use Salesforce and haven’t joined yet, do it now.
Trailhead is a Salesforce training system that let’s you earn badges while learning about various parts of the Salesforce ecosystem.