What is Salesforce?
This summer at the CATLab, a high-performing team of Westmont students and staff are crafting solutions for tech problems in Westmont’s admissions department through a cutting-edge platform called Salesforce. By building creative, efficient components in Salesforce, the CATLab aims to integrate Westmont’s separate advancement and admissions instances into one unified customer relationship management system, or CRM. The summer is well underway, and the CATLab has begun to push out improvements to the production instance of Salesforce.
What’s Salesforce?
Founded in 1999 in San Francisco, Salesforce is a platform which brings companies and customers together through customized, cloud-based customer relationship management. A CRM system strives to improve business relationships through keeping companies connected to customers and streamlining time-intensive processes. The CRM solution Salesforce allows companies and higher education institutions to focus on fostering relationships with individual people beyond mere numbers on a page.
How does it work?
Salesforce interconnects user data through objects, fields, and relationships. Objects are simply collections of snippets of information called fields, and fields can be connected to other fields through relationships. For example, a House object might have kitchen, bedroom, and address fields. Its address field might be related to the address field on the user Account object, since one tends to live at one’s house address.
Using this interconnected data, Salesforce developers can use design patterns called components to accomplish tasks. While Salesforce provides a myriad of native components, users can also write custom components to achieve their organization’s individual goals. For instance, a sellHouse component, when run, might disassociate all of the data from a House object with its current owner and re-associate it with a new one. Components allow tasks which take a long time to complete manually to be done at the click of a button.
How’s the CATLab using Salesforce this summer?
By the end of the summer, Westmont aims to merge its separate admissions and advancement instances of Salesforce into one platform. For CATLab developers, the merge means creating new profiles, new objects and fields, and new custom components because Admissions currently uses a third-party product in its Salesforce organization. By using only Westmont-designed customizations, the school will save thousands of dollars every year, but CATLab developers do not have access to the third-party product’s documentation—we’re starting from scratch.
While building an entire Salesforce package from zero may seem like a high order, the CATLab team stands ready for the task. CATLab developers spent the first two weeks of the summer becoming familiar with Salesforce, and last week began the build process for the new Admissions and Advancement integration. Split into two teams, one group is working on ways of sorting different college application types, and the other group is building an Import object and related components to correctly map imported data to the right fields and right objects. Changes are going live, and the CATLab is on track to a successful summer.
What next?
As the summer marches on, keep up-to-date on progress, events, and more by following the CATLab on social media. Find us on Instagram, Twitter, and more here: